Just four years ago, Lizzo was a flute-slaying star on the rise who idolized Beyoncé. Now, she and Queen Bey are releasing two of the summer's most anticipated albums just two weeks apart.

Lizzo's fourth album, Special, is the follow-up to 2019's GRAMMY-winning album Cuz I Love You. Arriving July 15, the album is buoyed by the No. 1 hit "About Damn Time," a disco-inspired anthem that's on the level of the artist who has inspired her most. (Beyoncé's seventh studio album, 'Renaissance,' is due July 29.)

Born in Detroit, Lizzo — whose birth name is Melissa Jefferson — moved to Bey's hometown of Houston when she was 10. As Lizzo began developing her skills as a flutist, Beyoncé was just getting started in Destiny's Child — and the inspiration began.

"When I first saw Destiny's Child, I was in the fifth grade, and it made me want to sing and make music," Lizzo told Interview in 2014. At the same time, Lizzo was hearing freestyles on the radio that also sparked something within her. "All of these influences and these styles started to blend together," she added. 

Over the next several years, she eventually got involved in Houston's indie scene. After joining a prog-rock band at 19, Lizzo knew she had found her path. "That's when I began to say, 'Okay, this is something that I could take seriously.'"

A self-confessed band geek from her tween years into college, Lizzo's musical path was a balancing act between her love of flute and love for singing. But as she got older, she realized that she was being pulled in two different directions in music.

"It was hard," she told CBS News in 2019. "I left college. I basically had to choose between flute or this other lifestyle that I was chasing, where I was up super-late with my friends, goin' to parties, tryin' to rap at shows, and then waking up early, gettin' to the band hall, rehearsing, being on the field, taking math class, which was torture.

"I was juggling a lot of lifestyles," she continued. "And simultaneously, in my personal life, my family was being, you know, torn apart. So, I didn't really have that type of support at that time in my life. And my father had started getting sick. And my mom moved away, because she needed to make money to support my dad and what he was going through and support her children."

Within a matter of years, Lizzo's future became perhaps more uncertain than ever: She dropped out of college, her dad passed away, and she quit the rock band she'd joined. "Twenty-one was the worst year of my life," she revealed to Teen Vogue in 2018. "I was addicted to the gym, I didn't eat and I was sleeping in a dusty car, all for music. I thought my life was over."

But through all of the hardships, one constant remained: Beyoncé.

"When I dropped out of college and I was really depressed, I listened to [Beyoncé's 2006 album] B'Day on repeat and I would just sing B'Day all the time," Lizzo said during her episode of Carpool Karaoke with James Corden in June. "And I was like, 'I'm going to be a singer, I'm going to be a singer.'

"The way she makes people feel is how I want to make people feel with music," Lizzo added. "She has been my North Star." (Beyoncé even inspired the name of Lizzo's beloved flute: Sasha Floot, an homage to Bey's 2008 album, I Am… Sasha Fierce, and the alter ego it introduced.)

In 2011, Lizzo moved to Minneapolis in hopes of a fresh start. She soon met Sophia Eris, who has since become one of her best friends, main collaborators, and Lizzo's touring DJ. The pair, along with Claire de Lune, formed The Chalice, a pop-rap trio inspired by — you guessed it — Destiny's Child. The lyrics of songs like "Push It" also payed homage to acts like Salt N Pepa and TLC, and teased the genre-melding stylings Lizzo would eventually take on in her own material.

The music scene in Minneapolis sparked Lizzo's creativity and helped change her mindset from wanting to give up to actively pursuing solo success. Her first album, a rap collection called Lizzobangers, came out on the Minneapolis-based indie label Totally Gross National Product in 2013; Virgin Records released it again in 2014. On the album, Eris appears with Lizzo on "Batches and Cookies" — which is also the first song Lizzo ever wrote — and songs such as "Faded" and "Bus Passes and Happy Meals" helped establish her own sonic lane. \
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After catching wind of her talent, Prince invited Lizzo and Eris to work on the song that became "Boytrouble" on his 2014 album with 3rdEyeGirl, Plectrumelectrum. Her rap verse and Prince-esque screams on "Boytrouble" contain all the early indications of the bad-b**** energy that rules her later songs. "99 problems, but these boys not one," she rhymes on the track.

"I felt like I kinda transcended from being just a vocalist into an artist," Lizzo said in a 2017 interview with Fuse about working with Prince. "That was a huge confirmation in what I was doing for me and my mama. It's surreal."\
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"And I got paid! My first big check ever. Thank you, Prince, for my laptop," she told NPR in 2019. (Prince later offered to produce an album for her, but he passed away in 2016 before a project could materialize.)

While confidence has never been lost on Lizzo's music, her trademark body-positivity anthems started taking shape on her 2015 self-released sophomore album, Big Grrrl Small World, with tracks like "My Skin" and "Humanize." After meeting producer Ricky Reed, she was signed to his label Nice Life Recordings, which had a deal with Atlantic Records. They released her Coconut Oil EP in 2016 and continued that important work of promoting self-love and esteem.\
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"I thought I needed to run and find somebody to love," she sings on the title track. "But all I needed was some coconut oil."\
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The following single, "Truth Hurts," was released in September 2017, but it would be three years before the release of Lizzo's next album. She'd later reveal that her mental health was tested during this time.\
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"The day I released 'Truth Hurts' was probably one of the darkest days I've had ever in my career," she shared with PEOPLE in 2019. "I remember thinking, 'If I quit music now, nobody would notice. This is my best song ever, and nobody cares.' I was like, 'F— it, I'm done.' And a lot of people rallied; my producer, my publicist and my family, they were like, 'Just keep going because this is the darkest before the dawn.'"\
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A 2019 re-release of "Truth Hurts" on the deluxe edition of Lizzo's third album, Cuz I Love You, was prompted by its popularity on TikTok and inclusion in a Netflix movie called Someone Great. Within six months, Lizzo went from obscurity to center stage: "Truth Hurts" reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2019.

The following year, the song won a GRAMMY for Best Pop Solo Performance. Lizzo — the most nominated act at the 2020 GRAMMYs, with eight nods — also took home the GRAMMY for Best Urban Contemporary Album and Best Traditional R&B Performance for "Jerome," and was nominated for Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Record of the Year for "Truth Hurts," Best New Artist, and Best R&B Performance for "Exactly How I Feel."

"Now the song that made me want to quit is the song that everyone's falling in love with me for, which is such a testament to journeys: Your darkest day turns into your brightest triumph," she told PEOPLE in the 2019 interview.

Cuz I Love You (Deluxe Edition) also includes the lead single, "Juice," "Water Me" (which was also originally released in 2017) and "Tempo," a collaboration with Missy Elliott. Lizzo's confidence grew as people embraced her and her music, and she started promoting body positivity in her everyday life on a higher level. In 2022, she debuted her own shapewear line called Yitty and released Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, an Emmy-nominated reality show on Amazon Prime that highlighted her process of selecting plus-sized dancers to perform with her on the road.

With three GRAMMYs and a slew of hits, Cuz I Love You became a tough album to follow. Even Lizzo herself has said that a song has to be perfect in order to be released.

"You're finally able to listen to this album I've been working on for three years, and I know it's been a long time, and it's about damn time I put it out," she says in "A Very Special Message from Lizzo," a post-song interlude that closes out Special. "But you have to know that I took my time for me, but I also took my time for you. I wrote almost 170 songs for this album to find these perfect 12 songs to bring to you because I felt like this was what not only I needed to hear, but you needed to hear and the whole world needs to hear."\
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Some of the cuts that made the 12-song Special tracklist were written over and over and over — including "About Damn Time." She revealed in an April interview with Big Boy's Neighborhood for Los Angeles' Real 92.3 that she wrote about "75 versions" of the song in the pursuit of making it flawless.\
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"There's ingredients to a perfect song," she told Big Boy. "The lyrics, the way the chorus lifts and makes you feel, the production sonics, the length of the song, what I am talking about in this exact moment and how it affects people in 2022. Not 2020, not 2021 — how it affects people right now."

She shared some of the many questions she asked herself while creating Special to see if songs were worthy of making the album. As Lizzo has alluded, fans can keep those questions in mind while listening to the album.\
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"Is it timeless? Is it going to be able to be sung forever? How do I sound on it, how do certain words sound coming out of my mouth? Can you make it an Instagram caption?" Lizzo posed to Big Boy. "There are so many things to the songs that have to make them perfect. It may not be the most viral number one song in the world but it's a good perfect f* song, like a perfect sandwich."\
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Special* is Lizzo with a wide-open heart, ready to give love to the world. No matter how perfect the finished product ended up, 'Special' stays true to the goal she's had from the beginning: Giving people the confidence Beyoncé gave her. But with or without Bey's influence, Lizzo's purpose has been driven by love — and now, she's made a full album about it.

"I think love is the heart of this album," she told Zane Lowe in a July interview for Apple Music. "I think everything I've been doing prior to Special was in pursuit of love. Cuz I Love You was almost this autobiographical album about who i want to be… and now Special is a celebration of who I am right now. It's very present, and I think that's the only place love can really exist — in the present."

She elaborates on Special's love-driven inspiration in "A Very Special Message from Lizzo," adding that the songs are what "the whole world needs to hear." As she closes it out with a heartfelt thank you, Lizzo adds one more uplifting message: "If you don't take nothin' away from this album, I want you to know, you're special, and I'm so glad you're still with us."\
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