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I
n February of this year,
Ariana Grande had the
number-one, number-two,
and number-three songs
in America. So extreme
a choke hold of the Bill-
board charts had only
one antecedent: the Beat-
les achieved it in 1964, when “Can’t
Buy Me Love,” “Twist and Shout,”
and “Do You Want to Know a Se-
cret” blanketed the airwaves. (Grande
responded to the news of her pop
preeminence in trademark terse, un-
punctuated Twitterese: “wait what”.)
But the singer, whose fame does not
so much polarize as it sorts—into
those who adore her, ape her high
ponytail, and have made her the sec-
ond-most-followed person on Insta-
gram, behind the Portuguese soccer
star Cristiano Ronaldo, and those for
whom she barely registers (yet)—was
in quiet knots. Thank U, Next, the
album she wrote and recorded in a
two-week fever dream the previous
October, contained the most wrench-
ingly 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.
“I was researching healing and
PTSD and talking to therapists, and
everyone was like, ‘You need a routine,
a schedule,’ ” 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.
“Of course because I’m an extrem-
ist, I’m like, OK, I’ll go on tour! But
it’s hard to sing songs that are about
wounds that are so fresh. It’s fun, it’s
pop music, and I’m not trying to make
it sound like anything that it’s not, but
these songs to me really do represent
some heavy shit.”
We are sitting in the home studio
of Tommy Brown, Grande’s close
friend and a producer on Thank U,
Next, at the end of a noiseless cul-
de-sac in Northridge, in the San Fer-
nando Valley. (The earthquake that
occurred here in 1994, six months after
Grande’s birth, was among the stron-
gest 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 ice-
berg roses and pepper trees. Grande’s
fans, knowns 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 cosset-
ed Floridian youth. “I’m like, please
bring me the cold and the clammy and
the clouds,” she says. “You want what
you didn’t grow up getting.”
Although she has a home of her
own in Beverly Hills, the kind of vast,
marble-paved manse that young stars
buy before they’re ready for them,
Tommy’s is where she likes spend-
ing time when she’s 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 happi-
est in her shell.) It occurs to me that
we’re talking about the weather for
precisely the reason that people talk
about the weather, in order to dance
around the “heavy shit.” It’s a dance
that spins out quickly. Grande begins
to cry nine minutes into our conver-
sation, at the mention of Coachella,
which she headlined this year for the
first time. Following a bumbling inter-
change of apologies—“I’m so sorry
I’m crying,” “I’m so sorry I made you
cry”—she explains that the festival
offered near-constant reminders of
the rapper Mac Miller (born Malcolm
McCormick), her dear friend, collab-
orator, and ex-boyfriend, who died of
an accidental overdose in September
- 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. “I never
thought I’d even go to Coachella,”
she explains. “I 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, process-
ing how much has happened in such
a brief period.”
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
At home, there was a karaoke
machine, and everyone was always singing.
“The soundtrack was Whitney,
Madonna, Mariah, Celine, Barbra,”
Ariana recalls.
“All the divas”
THREE OF HEARTS
“She has a way of taking
on everyone’s pain,” says
Grande’s mother, Joan,
center. Grandmother
Marjorie is at near right.
On Ariana: Chloé dress.
