Wiki
-
Length
2:55
“Tempo” is the third single of Lizzo’s album "Cuz I Love You", released on April 19, 2019. Featuring the iconic rapper Missy Elliott, the song is about body acceptance and how Lizzo needs a heavy beat to dance since slow songs are not enough for all she has to offer.
In an interview with Exclaim!, Lizzo spoke about her collaboration with Missy Elliott on “Tempo”:
"I’m very fortunate to be in a position where I have access to send Missy beats, and I have the privilege of being like, ‘Yo, let’s get Missy on this track.’ I was really hopeful that she would hop and she did, and now it’s become this moment for me. You know, when the song was first going down, it was more like ‘Finally I can talk my shit about being a big girl,’ but when Missy jumped on it, it really did make it a full-circle moment of being seen by her existing when I was younger. Hopefully I can really do the same for young girls today. But really, I was just making bops."
"Tempo" almost didn’t make the album, because for so long, I didn’t think it fit. The album has so much guitar and big, brassy instrumentation, but "Tempo" was a club record. I kept it off. When the project was finished and we had a listening session with the label, I played the album straight through. Then, at the end, I asked my team if there were any honorable mentions they thought I should play—and mind you, I had my girls there, we were drinking and dancing—and they said, ‘Tempo! Just play it. Just see how people react.’ So I did. No joke, everybody in the room looked at me like, Are you crazy? If you don’t put this song on the album, you’re insane. Then we got Missy and the rest is history.”
- Lizzo on Apple Music
A day before the track’s release, Lizzo posted a snippet of the track featuring a phone message from Missy Elliott wanting to know when she was going to drop their duet.
Track descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
![EVERYTHING IS LOVE [Clean] [Clean]](https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/300x300/2327a750741e190622d7dc1b3d81414c.jpg)