IN FEBRUARY OF THIS YEAR, Ariana Grande had the number-one, number-two, and number-three songs inâ
America.â
So extreme aâ
choke hold of the Billboard chartsâ
had only one antecedent: the Beatles achieved it in 1964, when âCanât Buy Me Love,â âTwist and Shout,â and âDo You Want to Know a Secretâ blanketed the airwaves. (Grande responded to the news of her pop preeminence in trademark terse, unpunctuated Twitterese: âwait whatâ.) But the singer, whose fame does not so much polarize as it sortsâinto those who adore her, ape her high ponytail, and have made her the second-most-followed person on Instagram, behind the Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, and those for whom she barely registers (yet)âwas in quiet knots. Thank U, Next, the album she wrote and recorded in a two-week fever dream the previous October, contained the most wrenchingly personal songs in her canon, and she was about to embark on a tour of at least 40 cities, where night after night she had to sing her way through a succession of private horrors.
âI was researching healing and PTSD and talking to therapists, and everyone was like, âYou need a routine, a schedule,â â Grande says, yanking off a pair of black, ultra-high platform ankle boots so that she can crisscross her legs on the sofa and sit close. The boots, by the way, are Sergio Rossi, though we have to dig into the insole to determine this; Grande knows about music, she says, and not about clothes. âOf course because Iâm an extremist, Iâm like, OK, Iâll go on tour! But itâs hard to sing songs that are about wounds that are so fresh. Itâs fun, itâs pop music, and Iâm not trying to make it sound like anything that itâs not, but these songs to me really do represent some heavy shit.â
We are sitting in the home studio of Tommy Brown, Grandeâs close friend and a producer on Thank U, Next, at the end of a noiseless cul-de-sac in Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley. (The earthquake that occurred here in 1994, six months after Grandeâs birth, was among the strongest ever recorded in an American city.) A layer of cloud casts a dull light over the low-lying suburban houses and their front yards dotted with iceberg roses and pepper trees. Grandeâs fans, known as Arianators, rivaling the Beyhive and the Little Monsters as the most dedicated and attuned in music, know that she loves the dour weather, hates the beach of her cosseted Floridian youth. âIâm like, please bring me the cold and the clammy and the clouds,â she says. âYou want what you didnât grow up getting.â
Although she has a home of her own in Beverly Hills, the kind of vast, marble-paved manse that young stars buy before theyâre ready for them, Tommyâs is where she likes spending time when sheâs in Los Angeles. Grande is wearing black leggings and an oversize sweatshirt emblazoned with the words SOCIAL HOUSE, the name of a pop duo from Pittsburgh who are friends and now one of her opening acts. A large white pearl, her birthstone, glimmers on her finger. (She is a Cancer: a little crab happiest in her shell.) It occurs to me that weâre talking about the weather for precisely the reason that people talk about the weather, in order to dance around the âheavy shit.â Itâs a dance that spins out quickly. Grande begins to cry nine minutes into our conversation, at the mention of Coachella, which she headlined this year for the first time. Following a bumbling interchange of apologiesââIâm so sorry Iâm crying,â âIâm so sorry I made you cryââshe explains that the festival offered near-constant reminders of the rapper Mac Miller (born Malcolm McCormick), her dear friend, collaborator, and ex-boyfriend, who died of an accidental overdose in September 2018. I imagined we would visit this and other delicate topics somewhere deep in our discussion, but grief creates a conversational black hole, drawing all particles to it. âI never thought Iâd even go to Coachella,â she explains. âI was always a person who never went to festivals and never went out and had fun like that. But the first time I went was to see Malcolm perform, and it was such an incredible experience. I went the second year as well, and I associate...heavily...it was just kind of a mindfuck, processing how much has happened in such a brief period.â
For a woman who recently turned 26 and is enjoying the most successful chapter of her career, it has also been a spectacularly, and publicly, brutal couple of years. Fifteen months before Millerâs death, in May 2017, Grande had just finished the encore of a sold-out show on her Dangerous Woman tour in Manchester, England, when a suicide bomber detonated in the foyer, leaving 23 people dead, including an eight-year-old concertgoer. Shell-shocked and reeling, Grande and her mother, who was in the audience that night, flew home to Florida. (The tweet she mustered the next day was for a time the most-liked in the mediumâs history: âbroken. from the bottom of my heart, i am so so sorry. i donât have words.â) But she quickly determined that before she was going to sing anywhere again, she needed to sing in Manchester. She returned two weeks later to visit survivors in hospitals and families in mourning. And she staged a benefit concert that raised $25 million. Guest stars included Coldplay, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber, and Grande cruised the stage belting out her dirtiest songs at the request of one victimâs mother after it was suggested that the bomber, who had links to the Islamic State, had acted in protest of her racy pop persona.
But it was Grandeâs culminating rendition of âOver the Rainbow,â intoned through her sobs, that is the nightâs eternal image. If you didnât know Ari, as her friends call her, if you sorted into that other group and assumed that Grande was a lab-engineered Frankensinger, a sexy cyborg extruding melismas in baby doll dresses and kitten ears, here may have been the first piece of evidence to the contrary. âArianaâs an open book,â says her friend Miley Cyrus, who flew over for the concert. âShe has always shared her experiences with this beautiful blend of reality and the fantasy that pop culture requires. But holding her in my arms that night and feeling her shake from the loss of lives, literally feeling her heart pounding against mineâwhen you can let down the personas and cry with the rest of the world, itâs unifying. Itâs a reminder that music can be our greatest healer.â
She released no original music until the following spring, when âNo Tears Left to Cry,â the first single off her fourth studio album, Sweetener, offered up a dance-floor hymn to optimism in the face of catastrophe. (The albumâs closing track, âGet Well Soon,â addresses Manchesterâs survivors directly. Including a period of silence at the songâs end, it clocks in at 5:22, the date of the bombing.) But in November 2018, after Millerâs death and the dissolution of her brief engagement to the Saturday Night Live comic Pete Davidson, Grande had to acknowledge that she was far from cried out, and she did so in a now-famous tweet: âremember when i was like hey i have no tears left to cry and the universe was like HAAAAAAAAA bitch u thought.â
These words, classic darkly humorous and self-deprecating Grande, are about as far as she has been willing to go toward addressing the events of the last two years. âIâve been open in my art and open in my DMs and my conversations with my fans directly, and I want to be there for them, so I share things that I think theyâll find comfort in knowing that I go through as well,â she explains. âBut also there are a lot of things that I swallow on a daily basis that I donât want to share with them, because theyâre mine. But they know that. They can literally see it in my eyes. They know when Iâm disconnected, when Iâm happy, when Iâm tired. Itâs this weird thing we have. Weâre like fucking E.T. and Elliott.â Grande admits to approaching our conversation with a mix of dread and guilt about her dread. âIâm a person whoâs been through a lot and doesnât know what to say about any of it to myself, let alone the world. I see myself onstage as this perfectly polished, great-at-my-job entertainer, and then in situations like this Iâm just this little basket-case puddle of figuring it out.â She laughs through her sniffles. âI have to be the luckiest girl in the world, and the unluckiest, for sure. Iâm walking this fine line between healing myself and not letting the things that Iâve gone through be picked at before Iâm ready, and also celebrating the beautiful things that have happened in my life and not feeling scared that theyâll be taken away from me because trauma tells me that they will be, you know what I mean?â
GRANDE GREW UP IN Boca Raton, Florida, in a gated community of expensive and lushly planted Mediterranean-style homes. Her mother, Joan Grande, Brooklyn-born and Barnard-educated, owns a business selling marine communications equipment; her father, Edward Butera, is a graphic designer. The couple divorced when Grande was eight. Ariana grew up in character, in a household that relished characters. The theme of her third birthday party was Jaws. She loved to run around the house in a Jason mask, and at Halloween, Joan liked to buy animal organs and leave them floating in dishes. âMy family is eccentric and weird and loud and Italian,â Grande says. âThere was always this fascination with the macabre. My mom is goth. Her whole wardrobe is modeled after Cersei Lannisterâs. Iâm not kidding. Iâm like, âMom, why are you wearing epaulets? Itâs Thanksgiving.â â
Grande declared herself early. Joan recalls a car ride when Ariana was around three and a half; NSYNC was playing, and over and over the little girl perfectly matched JC Chasezâs high notes. There was a karaoke machine at home, and everyoneâAriana, her older half-brother, Frankie, and her motherâwas always singing. âThe soundtrack was Whitney, Madonna, Mariah, Celine, Barbra,â she recalls. âAll the divas. Gay, divas, divas, gay, belting divas.â Joan also played a lot of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and the family watched old musicals, especially the Judy GarlandâMickey Rooney pictures. âShe was so intrigued by how pristine and precise these women were,â Joan recalls. âShe studied them carefully.â When the family loved a show, they could be obsessive; Joan estimates that they saw Jersey Boys on Broadway close to 60 times.
Grande has a preternatural gift for impersonating other singers and actressesâa talent that has made her a surprise darling of the nighttime-television circuit. (After watching her host Saturday Night Live three years ago, Steven Spielberg texted Lorne Michaels to sing her praises.) Grande credits her healthy vocal technique to having learned to mimic Celine Dion, in particular, whose seamless blending through her registers and careful vocal placement have given her greater durability than many of her peers. âI learned how to make it sound like I was belting and being loud without actually belting and being loud,â Grande explains. âThe voice is expensive, and if youâre spending it properly, youâll be able to keep spending it.â When I tell her that Iâm surprised by her interest in Judy Garlandânot an obvious source of inspiration for a pop artist born nearly 25 years after her deathâshe cradles her arms in a manner that immediately brings the legend to mind. âI would stand in front of the TV and mimic her body movements. I was always fascinated. She carried herself in a way that was so protected and soft and Judy.â
After years of local childrenâs theater, Grande landed a role in the Broadway musical 13. (She was 14 at the time.) Weeks after the musical closed, she was cast as the goofy sidekick Cat Valentine on the Nickelodeon show Victorious, which made her a star with the tween set. âI never really saw myself as an actress,â she says, âbut when I started talking about wanting to make R&B music at 14, they were like, âWhat the fuck would you sing about? This is never going to work. You should audition for some TV shows and build yourself a platform and get yourself out there, because youâre funny and cute and you should do that until youâre old enough to make the music you want to make.â So I did that. I booked that TV show, and then I was like, OK, now can I make music?â While Victorious marched on, in her free time Grande liked to upload YouTube videos of herself singing covers of Adele, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey. It was a virtuoso rendition of Careyâs âEmotions,â which Grande posted in August 2012, when she was 19, that made her a hot property. Since then she has worked at a frantic pace, turning out five albums in six years, all of them certified platinum, and touring the world three times.
If one aspect of Grandeâs career has been immune to critique, itâs her singing. Patti LaBelle came to know her several years ago, when Grande asked the R&B icon to perform at her birthday party. They have become friends. âSheâs surpassed her peers,â LaBelle says. âAnd she does everything herself, which is not always the way with the young baby girls. She doesnât need any machines. Sheâs a baby whoâs able to sing like an older black woman.â LaBelle, whose four-year-old granddaughter, Gia, wears an Ariana ponytail, recalls the time when both singers performed for the Obamas at the Women of Soul concert at the White House. Grande was extremely nervous. âI said, âGirl, youâre a beast. Go up there and sing like that white-black woman you are.â Ariana can sing me under the tableâand listen, I can sing.â
Grandeâs personal style has left her more vulnerable. Some critics have chafed at her uniform of bubblegum lampshade dresses and thigh-high boots, with their uneasy mix of sybarite and schoolgirlâas if she were the contrivance of a horny industry Humbert. She is not. âSheâs like an R-rated version of a Disney character, super-vivid,â says Pharrell Williams, who produced much of Sweetener and clocked long hours in the studio with Grande pre- and post-Manchester. âBut sheâs full of self-awareness. That meta-cognition is part of her personality.â To those troubled by her image, Grande has a silencing reply: She just likes it. âI like having my funny character that I play,â she explains, âthat feels like this exaggerated version of myself. It protects me. But also I love disrupting it for the sake of my fans and making clear that Iâm a personâbecause thatâs something I enjoy fighting for. I canât help disrupt it. Iâm incredibly impulsive and passionate and emotional and just reckless. The music is very personal and very real, but yes, if you can be me for Halloween, if drag queens can dress up as me, then Iâm a character. Go to your local drag bar, and youâll see it. Thatâs, like, the best thing thatâs ever happened to me. Itâs better than winning a Grammy.â (Incidentally, Grande won her first Grammy this year, when Sweetener was awarded Best Pop Vocal Album.)
While the character has been remarkably consistent across her career, Grande feels itâs only in the last year that she has been able to make the music she has always wanted to make. âThere was a two-album period where I was doing half the songs for me and half the songs to solidify my spot in pop music,â she acknowledges. âA lot of my singles have been hilariously lacking in substance. Youâre talking to someone who put âSide to Sideâ out as a single. I love that song, but itâs just a fun song about sex.â I ask her if it ever feels uncomfortable to gaze out at an audience of thousands of nine-year-old girls while singing a song about having so much coitus that itâs hard to walk straight. âTheyâre for sure gonna have it. I promise. I promise that your kidâs gonna have sex. So if she asks you what the songâs about, talk about it.â One clever aspect of Thank U, Next is the way it coaxes out your most cynical notions about Grande, then forces you to reevaluate them. Consider the three singles that ruled February: âBreak Up with Your Girlfriend, Iâm Bored,â â7 Rings,â and the title track. A song ostensibly about female rivalry is in fact about self-love; a paean to materialism celebrates sisterhood; and what sounds like it will be a haughty diss track turns out to be a reflection on the importance of gratitude and reappraisal.
Itâs tempting to think of Manchester as the inflection point in Grandeâs career, though she shrinks from any narrative about the bombing that might place her at its center. âItâs not my trauma,â she says as tears fill her eyes. âItâs those familiesâ. Itâs their losses, and so itâs hard to just let it all out without thinking about them reading this and reopening the memory for them.â She pauses to collect herself. âIâm proud that we were able to raise a lot of money with the intention of giving people a feeling of love or unity, but at the end of the day, it didnât bring anyone back. Everyone was like, Wow, look at this amazing thing, and I was like, What the fuck are you guys talking about? We did the best we could, but on a totally real level we did nothing. Iâm sorry. I have a lot to say that could probably help people that I do want to share, but I have a lot that I still need to process myself and will probably never be ready to talk about. For a long time I didnât want to talk to anyone about anything, because I didnât want to think about anything. I kind of just wanted to bury myself in work and not focus on the real stuff, because I couldnât believe it was real. I loved going back into the studio with Pharrell because he just has this magical outlook on everything. He truly believes that the light is coming. And Iâm like, Bruh, is it, though?â
SINCE MANCHESTER, GRANDE HAS emerged as an outspoken advocate of gun control, singing at last yearâs March for Our Lives, organized by the survivors of the Parkland massacre. She flew from Hong Kong to Charlottesville on the last day of her Dangerous Woman tour to perform in A Concert for Charlottesville, a response to the Unite the Right rally. She is passionately pro-LGBTQ and passionately antiâDonald Trump at a time when many of her peers have chosen to remain silent about politics lest they alienate a segment of their fan base. âI would rather sell fewer records and be outspoken about what I think is some fuckery than sell more records and be . . . Switzerland. Am I allowed to say that? I love Switzerland. The fake wokes are waiting to attack!â
The studio remains Grandeâs safe haven. When Miller died, her friendsâ Tommy, the singer Victoria Monet, her childhood best friend, Aaron Gross, and othersâgathered around her in New York, where she had been living. Somebody pointed out that Jungle City Studios was right around the corner from her apartment. âMy friends know how much solace music brings me, so I think it was an all-around, letâs-get-her-there type situation,â she recalls. âBut if Iâm completely honest, I donât remember those months of my life because I was (a) so drunk and (b) so sad. I donât really remember how it started or how it finished, or how all of a sudden there were 10 songs on the board. I think that this is the first album and also the first year of my life where Iâm realizing that I can no longer put off spending time with myself, just as me. Iâve been booâd up my entire adult life. Iâve always had someone to say goodnight to. So Thank U, Next was this moment of self-realization. It was this scary moment of âWow, you have to face all this stuff now. No more distractions. You have to heal all this shit.â â
TOMMY BROWN BELIEVES THAT Thank U, Next is Grandeâs inner life set to a trap beat. âWe were in that studio to throw paint around,â he recalls. âWe werenât thinking about an album. We were drinking a lot of champagne and, I think, doing a lot of therapy with each other. That album is so real because Ari makes her music in the real time of whatâs happening in her life.â When I ask Grande whether it is fair to call Thank U, Next a response to Millerâs death, the tears return, along with the reciprocal apologies. Her characteristic heavy eyeliner, flared upward at the edges in the Maria Callas style, never runs. âItâs just hard to hear it so plainly put,â she says. She has rarely commented on her relationship with Miller and has taken umbrage when the media has sought to define her according to her romantic relationships. But in May 2018, she made an exception in the form of a widely admired clapback after a fan of Millerâs took to Twitter following the rapperâs arrest for drunk driving, suggesting that being spurned by Grande was the cause. Her reply was swift and lacerating: âshaming and blaming a woman for a manâs inability to keep his shit together is a very major problem. letâs please stop doing that.â
âPeople donât see any of the real stuff that happens, so they are loud about what they think happened,â she says now. âThey didnât see the years of work and fighting and trying, or the love and exhaustion. That tweet came from a place of complete defeat, and you have no idea how many times I warned him that that would happen and fought that fight, for how many years of our friendship, of our relationship. You have no idea so youâre not allowed to pull that card, because you donât fucking know. Thatâs where that came from.â Grande spent years consumed by worry about Miller. Friends with her during the Dangerous Woman tour recall a woman up at all hours, desperately tracking his whereabouts to ensure he wasnât on a bender. âItâs pretty all-consuming,â she says of her grief over Miller. âBy no means was what we had perfect, but, like, fuck. He was the best person ever, and he didnât deserve the demons he had. I was the glue for such a long time, and I found myself becoming . . . less and less sticky. The pieces just started to float away.â
Grande has since backed off from using social media to unload her feelings, instead mainly posting benignly glamorous images of ponytails and photos of her dogs (she has seven, as well as a miniature potbelly pig called Piggy Smalls). This is an about-face for a woman who has become actual friends with her fans through Twitter, who has been known to direct-message them bars of music before she has shared them with the folks at her label. âEveryone thinks Iâm crazy for doing it, but I care about what they have to say more than I care about what anyone at my label has to say, no offense,â she explains. âThis is a me-and-them thing. Iâm not taking one of those corny breaks from social media where youâre like, âThe internet hurts me, Iâm leaving, goodbye.â But Iâve definitely established a new boundary. I donât want to get myself into some shit.â Joan says that she and her daughter have talked a lot about the maintenance of boundaries lately. Ariana has always been an empath. âShe has a way of taking on everyoneâs pain,â Joan says. âShe functions really beautifully, but when she has to laser herself to those heartbreaking moments, I donât think she can find anything but tears. Sure, I worry about her, but I always tell her, how youâre feeling right now is perfect.â
One of the more puzzling chapters of Grandeâs public life was her short-lived engagement to Davidson last year, a kamikaze move made in the haze of her breakup with Miller. Her friends had convinced her to decamp to New York, to escape L.A. and her patterns there. âMy friends were like, âCome! Weâre gonna have a fun summer.â And then I met Pete, and it was an amazing distraction. It was frivolous and fun and insane and highly unrealistic, and I loved him, and I didnât know him. Iâm like an infant when it comes to real life and this old soul, been-around-the-block-a-million-times artist. I still donât trust myself with the life stuff.â
Art is made richer through experience, of course, and Grande has never made better artâor sold more recordsâthan when she decided to make music out of the bitter history of the last two years. But itâs nice to get away from oneself now and then: She is currently writing and producing the soundtrack to the upcoming film reboot of Charlieâs Angels, will costar in Ryan Murphyâs Netflix adaptation of the Broadway musical The Promâand thereâs a big acting job sheâs hoping to land, though she doesnât want to jinx it.
âI have this idea of what Iâd like to be,â she says. âI can see this stronger, amazing, fearless version of myself that one day I hope to evolve into. Sometimes I try to be that for my fans before I actually am that myself. I think Iâve been avoiding putting in the work. You know how that gets: You push your therapist away at some point, but then you have to get back to it.â She musters a laugh. âDo you know a good therapist?â