Perched high above Beverly Hills there lies a quintessential pop star's mansion. It's noticeably under-furnished, in that way peculiar to the homes of young superstars, and as quiet as a padded cell. Up by the gates a security team lingers, while in the kitchen a 25-year-old woman wearing a pair of fluffy pink socks, her hair in a 3ft-long ponytail, is making me a cup of tea. It is a hot day in California, yet as Ariana Grande fusses with the kettle and tea bags, barely any sunshine touches the marble floors of her 6,000sq ft hideaway. This fact does not bother Instagram's third most followed person (125 million people and counting). It has become apparent in the 10 minutes since she cheerfully welcomed me into her slightly airless pocket of super-fame — a space that, for the past year at least, Ariana sometimes hasn't felt like leaving — that her approach to interior design is quite bonkers.
It was in the hallway that things first started to get weird. "Enjoying the fake fall that I keep up all year round?" she teased, ponytail swishing. One thing fans adore about the Ariana phenomenon, which the wider media often fail to grasp, is that for all her devotion to pristine eyeliner and iPhone pouting, she is actually a self-confessed weirdo. With this in the mind, the Italian-American singer has made the — how to put this delicately? — esoteric lifestyle choice to live in a perpetual Halloween. Deep into the new spring, her elaborate metal bannisters remain smothered with fake spider webs and hung with scores of plastic pumpkins. "Fall is my favourite," she explains evenly. "It was ending, and I was like, 'Oh, man, I wish it could still be fall.' Then I was like, 'Oh, wait, I'm an adult and this is my house... it can!'" She glances around her pop palace dreamily. "I was thinking of putting up more. What do you think?"
The experience of interviewing Grande is akin to a teenage sleepover; her chat is sugared with girlish statements such as, "I'm serving heather-grey realness," which she delivers with hand-on-hip pose, referring to today's outfit. Meanwhile her small talk is often surreal. "I love clouds," she ponders. "I'm actually sad you came on such a sunny day," she says pulling out her phone — which buzzes constantly — so she can show me an album of her garden on a dull morning.
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Her eyes blink sweetly as she fiddles with her hair. She's nervous. When people talk about a "year that changed everything", I'm not sure anyone could imagine the past 12 months in the life of Ariana Grande. In the spring of 2017, the former child star appeared to want for nothing. Her recording career — built on an extraordinary four-octave vocal range — had taken her to the very limits of success; a catalogue of wildly infectious R&B/EDM-tinged pop songs streamed several billion times over, sell-out tours, clothing lines and a fabulous run of music videos that appeared to chronicle her on a noble mission to find the world's shortest skirt. Along the way she cultivated an army of fans — her Arianators, who number in the tens of millions — along with faux scandals, fascinating boyfriend choices, and all the other flotsam that comes with being the biggest thing in pop. To top it all — literally — she perfected the most scrutinised up-do in history. An excellent life for a woman not long out of her teens.
Then: tragedy. On May 22, 2017, during the British leg of her Dangerous Woman tour, as the crowd poured out of her concert at Manchester Arena, a young man called Salman Abedi walked into the foyer and detonated a homemade bomb, killing 22 of her fans and their parents, as well as himself. A further 500 people sustained injuries in the worst act of terrorism Britain had experienced since the 7/7 bombings more than a decade before. That Grande's audience skews so young only added to the horror. Ari, as her fans call her, is also a lightning rod for those who are a bit different — her concerts are often a place for the bullied and anxious to let loose, and LGBTQ kids frequently come out for the first time when they are introduced to the "Break Free" singer at her meet-and-greets. She hugs them and proclaims, "Tonight's show will be your coming-out party!"
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As the events of that night unfolded in real time across social media and on global news stations, it became apparent this was an agony that no one knew how to process. Grande tweeted in the early hours: "Broken. From the bottom of my heart, I am so so sorry. I don't have words." So she did something else: she announced that she would throw a memorial concert in the city of Manchester, to honour the dead and raise money for the families of victims. Initially, this was not a universally popular proposition. Grief police — such as Piers Morgan — were out in force, questioning her appropriateness. But come the night, come the woman. She gathered the biggest names in music — from Coldplay and Liam Gallagher to Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus — and in jeans, sweatshirt and spike heels became the superhero we needed. When she sang with a local school choir the effect was beautiful, devastating and healing. An unlikely national treasure was born.
Even so, Grande largely remains a mystery — certainly to most non-millennials. She has plenty of friends, but she says they often just hang out at home because paparazzi and security make travel a bore. Yet make no mistake, Grande is also at the top of her game, successful in a way that only a handful of other women can understand (Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lawrence, perhaps). Earning tens of millions of pounds a year, she carries a multi-platform empire on her tiny shoulders and exerts huge influence in the industry — not least because of the insane devotion of her online followers. Few artists are more digitally adored by fans. "I love, love, love them!" she cries. "Talking to them every single day, say hi, favourite their tweets." She sighs. "I always end up sharing too much."
Famously, she is only 5ft tall — though advance knowledge fails to prepare you for just how teensy the real-life experience is. It is a bit like having an audience with an extremely glamorous sparrow, I think, as she flits politely around me, swooping in for occasional hugs. We take our tea through to her dining room, filled with an enormous table covered in scattered notes and piles of make-up and old sunglasses. Though she has lived here for three years, she has yet to hang anything on her walls except tacked-up sheets of A2 paper with handwritten to-do lists on them ("Things: Roll out single. Go to New York..."). The vibe is a bit like the world's most expensive student house — apart from all the dogs. Grande currently has seven, though she has banished all but a small, sandy mongrel called Toulouse Lautrec from the room. Toulouse is "very much an artist", she explains.
Rather brilliantly, Ariana has dressed for Vogue in the following: hand-me-down sweatshirt with tacked-on floral-print patches, black leggings from Reebok, with which she has a sponsorship deal, "and", she says, leaning into my recorder for comic effect, "a mystery scrunchie". Obviously, she's obsessed with heels. "Oversized men's jackets as dresses, thigh boots and generally no pants [trousers]," is how she describes her preferred look, wryly. Colour is key. "My fans are obsessed with knowing my favourite colour," she says, twinkling, "so this is important: it was lavender, and then it was yellow, but now it's ice blue." She tilts her head to one side, in school-playground mode. "Like, ice blue mixed with grey."
Grande is at the tail end of her "epic" four-month, self-enforced social-media ban (her Insta army has been bereft, as have the Twitter and Facebook infantry), so is entirely off-duty, enjoying her last days of privacy before her single "No Tears Left To Cry" heralds a triumphant return to public life. In a few days' time, the breathtaking pop smash — with its themes of private grief and universal catharsis — will top the iTunes charts in 85 countries simultaneously hours after its release (a career high). Whacking it on her speakers for me, she explains that she has called her fourth album Sweetener. "because it sounds so youthful and unassuming at first, but when you listen to the music you understand what it's really about."
Thumping beats and her astonishing vocals fill the room — Pharrell Williams and Max Martin have done the production honours. It's gold-standard stuff. Ariana had total control over the project, and I think how smart she is. On a track called "Get Well Soon" she has managed to write what amounts to a self-care manual and marry it with the most infectious hook. It's like a smile and a tear at the same time, I tell her. "That's been a lot of my year," she replies. "Music needs to make people feel hopeful and free and happy."
Then a seriousness enters her voice. "I think a lot of people have anxiety, especially right now," she says. How is your anxiety, I ask? "My anxiety has anxiety," says Ariana, smiling. "No. I've always had anxiety. I've never really spoken about it because I thought everyone had it, but when I got home from tour it was the most severe I think it's ever been." In September 2017, she returned to Los Angeles after finishing her concert commitments in Asia, South America and Australia, then insisted on doing what she'd always done: work. "Everybody thought I was crazy when I got home and wanted to hit the ground running. I was in the studio the next day," she says. "I am a workaholic," she explains. "It is the thing I know how to do best. I've been working straight since I made my Broadway debut at the age of 14."
On one level, this isn't surprising. The audacity of her drive is the stuff of music industry legend. Myth has it that she settled on life as a pop diva when, aged four, she was taken by her mother, Joan, to a Celine Dion concert near the family's middle-class home in the hot, humid Florida city of Boca Raton. "Could you ever imagine doing such a thing?" Joan asked, presumably during a thundering second encore of "My Heart Will Go On", to which baby Ariana coolly replied, "Yes." By eight she was on local television singing the national anthem at ice-hockey games and a star of her local theatre group. (She has a musicals-loving older half-brother, Frankie.) At 11 she precociously traded Catholicism for Kabbalah over her objection to the former's stance on homosexuality, and at 14 she made her way to New York to become a theatre pro. The objective was always a huge recording contract, but accepting that she was still too young for the sort of chart success she wanted, she smartly moved into tween TV, relocating to Hollywood to star in the Nickelodeon hits Victorious and Sam and Cat.
In fact, her music career is barely five years in — though the monster hits have been constant and myriad. "Problem", "One Last Time", "My Everything", "Bang Bang", "Side to Side" and now "No Tears Left To Cry"... for a certain sort of teen and twentysomething, Ariana has been the soundtrack to their lives. Yet, in some ways, her own growing up was rapid and tough. She points out that in the past decade she has, by choice, worked almost every day. "I think I'm more comfortable working than I am doing real-life things."
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Last year, of course, things became all too real. I tell her how extraordinary it was to watch her perform at the One Love concert, how in the pit of the tragedy she became an authentic touchstone for love. She starts to cry. "I was expecting this," she apologises. "It's just as much as time passes, and as much time you try to spend processing it, I don't think one will ever know how to really, fully process it... I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to burst into tears."
She gathers herself. The tribute concert meant so much to her — she wants to address it. "I have always loved England, but I've never seen a city or a country take something that portrays the absolute worst of humanity and turn it into something that portrays the best and the most beautiful," she says. "I don't think there are enough words to describe my love and adoration for the people of Manchester." She still sees her local fans talking to each other online, and is impossibly moved. "Harry Styles had a concert coming up in Manchester and I know some of my fans were going, and it was their first time going to a concert in that venue since mine. I was so proud of how they were interacting with one another and caring for one another..." she says, her voice faltering.
She met with all the victims' families and almost all the injured, and remains in touch with many of them. "I think about certain interactions that I had with people when I was there all the time and I wonder how they're doing. You know, Saffie's father..." Saffie Roussos was the eight-year-old girl who was killed that night. "I check in with Millie [Robson, 15 at the time, left with shrapnel in her legs] often on Twitter," she says. Almost every word brings fresh tears. It's hard, I say, not to imagine that the dizziness and extreme anxiety you faced when you got home weren't actually signs of post-traumatic stress disorder? "I hate... yeah... admitting it but it very much is," she says, bringing her knees up to her chest. "That's what everyone was telling me. It's hard to talk about because so many people have suffered such severe, tremendous loss. But, yeah, it's a real thing. I know those families and my fans, and everyone there experienced a tremendous amount of it as well. Time is the biggest thing. I feel like I shouldn't even be talking about my own experience — like I shouldn't even say anything. I don't think I'll ever know how to talk about it and not cry."
There is something so heartbreaking about her having cried off the perfect shelf of signature eyeliner she had earlier applied. She just looks so impossibly young. Panicking that she's worrying me, she jumps up to put some more music on. "Sorry, sorry!" she keeps saying. There was a time when Grande had a reputation for being a bit difficult — or its sexist equivalent, "a diva" — and certainly most children who become this famous are wired a little differently. Yet her principal worries today are entirely about others. The takeaway is that she is extraordinarily kind.
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She has made a few public forays in the past few months — performing at the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, in March, for example, and doing a surprise turn at Coachella — but has spent most of her days in the studio, and her nights at home. She had therapy and watched "a lot of Grey's Anatomy" . She cooked with her family — "we're going to make sauce tonight, so Italian, with zucchini pasta" — and went for many "six-mile runs". Some days, when she was feeling really awful, she would do the previously unthinkable and just "get in bed and, you know, have a day". For the first time in her short life, she paused.
And so for all the tears, as she sits petting Toulouse high up in her superstar's eyrie, Grande seems ready to return to earth. "You put so much time and so much of yourself into something, and then all of a sudden you give it to the world and it's no longer yours," she says of the juggernaut album she is about to reveal. In time, our conversation drifts to the power of pop, the power of having 200 million followers, and the state of the world today, until eventually Ariana gives a little shrug. "Sometimes," she says, "it's kind of just about being the light in a situation."