To say Ariana Grande has had a successful year is an understatement: the “Thank U, Next” singer broke records in February for having the most simultaneous top 40 Billboard Hot 100 hits by a female artist, with 11 tracks. Since then, she’s also embarked on a worldwide tour for Sweetener. In the midst of this chaos, Grande is Vogue’s August cover star, for which she gave a candid interview and talked about her rollercoaster year of professional wins and some personal hardships. Below, five things you likely didn’t know about Ariana Grande:
Despite her four-octave range, Grande has had no formal vocal training. “Music just kind of happened, I never really trained for anything,” she said in 2013. “I played French horn for a few years, that’s where I learned a lot about sheet music and theory. I play a little bit of piano by ear but it’s mostly just singing, which I never was trained in.” Grande’s musical impression skills, however, are no coincidence: “Growing up, I was listening to Whitney Houston all the time, The Bodyguard soundtrack, a lot of Judy Garland and oldies, and divas.”
She grew up in a family of characters who enjoyed embracing their weirdness. Grande’s third birthday party was themed around Jaws; around Halloween, her mother, Joan, also liked to buy animal organs and leave them floating in dishes. “My family is eccentric and weird and loud and Italian,” Grande said in her Vogue cover story. “There was always this fascination with the macabre. My mom is goth. Her whole wardrobe is modeled after Cersei Lannister’s. I’m not kidding. I’m like, ‘Mom, why are you wearing epaulets? It’s Thanksgiving.’”
Grande had a tough time headlining Coachella in 2019; in her new Vogue profile, she shared that all she could think about at the music festival was her ex Mac Miller, who passed away from a drug overdose in 2018. “I never thought I’d even go to Coachella,” she explained. “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, processing how much has happened in such a brief period.”
When Grande’s half-brother, Frankie (also a successful musical theater performer) came out as gay, the singer began to question the tenets of her faith. “When my brother was told that God didn’t love him I was like, ‘Okay, that’s not cool,’” she said. Her spiritual exploration eventually led her to Kabbalah. “They were building a Kabbalah center in Florida so we both checked it out and really had a connection with it,” she said. “[It] sort of stuck with me. And since then my life has unfolded in a really beautiful way, and I think that it has a lot to do with the tools I’ve learned through Kabbalah, I really do.”
After repeatedly dying her hair cherry-soda red for the role of Cat Valentine in Nickelodeon’s sitcom Victorious, the show partially responsible for her breakthrough, Grande revealed that she has to wear extensions due to her hair damage. “Some people make fun of me for [my hair], but I don’t know who those ‘some people’ are, so I don’t care,” she once said. The singer is also somewhat mystified by fans’ response to her signature high ponytail. “Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it to become a thing. I wasn’t expecting to ever have a signature look. But it became one,” she told Ryan Murphy. The Scream Queens creator even said that he received “death threats” on Twitter from fans who were concerned that he would make her change her ’do for the role on the FX show.
Watch Ariana Grande’s New “In My Head” Cover Video:
