Ariana Grande has given interviews sparingly over the last couple years, and she explained that decision today during her appearance on Evan Ross Katz’s podcast, Shut Up Evan.
In their wide-ranging conversation, Grande discussed her approach to the press now after feeling “unsafe” when she was younger (“I’m older now, and I sort of am less afraid of being a person who has conversations with people I love especially.”) She also touched on how she decides what parts of her life she keeps private, why she quit X, then known as Twitter, and if she’d do a tour or be on Broadway again (good news on both fronts).
Here, highlights from the hour-long interview.
“It’s a tricky thing to balance and to navigate because I do want to sort of express my feelings of my experiences [in my music], but I also want to protect the details of my life. I feel pretty grateful for how it [album Eternal Sunshine] ended up, and that took a lot of combing through different versions of things and sort of tweaking little minor things here and there to be more protective, but also, I guess, express what was in my heart and on my mind. But the thing is, is that people still have so many... They took it how they took it.
“They have so many of their own interpretations of this music, and it’s so interesting to see because I’m like, ‘Wow, this so beautiful. This means something to me and to you it means something completely different.’
“And I think that’s a beautiful thing because I know what I wrote the songs about, and I know what they helped me sort of heal [from], but it’s still protected. And people are now using these songs to heal themselves [from] their own experience. There’s still a lot of misperceptions about everything out there [regarding my personal life] so I’m like okay, good, I guess it wasn’t too direct. Good, great, fine.”
On resisting the urge to speak out and correct what people are saying about her:
“I’ve sent you so many drafts of things that I’ve been like, I want to say this so badly. And you’ve been like, ‘Listen, I support you if you want to. Sleep on it.’ And I always sleep on it.
“And I always come back around to protecting and not taking that bait because I think what I have discovered is like protecting my peace and my privacy and the actual details of—you know, sometimes when it would be addressing something, it would actually be exposing more of your actual real life.
“Protecting that peace and privacy is actually far more important than the understanding and approval of letting people in in that way [that] is destructive. And maybe letting people in through art is cathartic and necessary to live.”
On exploring doing a mini tour for her new album:
“Well, I still want it too. That’s the thing. I think it would be a really lovely idea to be able to trickle in some shows in between the two Wicked films. I think there’s a version of that that exists. It’s definitely for a multitude of reasons not going to be a tour in the way that I used to tour. It would be a mini little sampling of shows, I think. But I do think it would be really nice to do that. And it’s something my team and I are working on coming up with options for.”
On why she quit X, then known as Twitter:
“I always wanted to say things to my fans that were meant for just my fans. And we could have our jokes and our conversations. And then sometimes it would travel in a way that it wasn’t intended to or like become a thing where people who don’t speak our language would kind of become involved in weird, strange way. But that wasn’t really why I deactivated [Twitter] or why I changed my relationship to it.
“I think I was just so sensitive. I was just so sensitive. And I think it started taking toll on my relationship to work. I wanted to prioritize being an artist and having a healthy relationship to my fans and to art. You know, I don’t know. I felt it sort of shift how I felt about work for a while. I deactivated from being a Cancer who is sensitive. That was basically it.”
She added she is still very online on Instagram: “I’m very much [an] ‘on the internet’ person.”
On if she’d return to Broadway:
“That’s also another thing that I would die to do. I think it would have to be the very right thing. And I don’t know what that is.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to invite myself back. I’m assuming that I would have to audition and hope and see whatever was happening. I don’t know what’s on the horizon.”
