Ariana Grande has opened up about “healing her relationship” with music and the pressures of touring.
The singer and actress has stepped back from her music career in recent years to focus on acting, most notably her role as Glinda in the Wicked films.
In 2024, Ariana released Eternal Sunshine, her first album in four years and seventh studio record, which she will support with a 41-date tour across North America and Europe in 2026. She previously stated that this will be her last tour for a while.
In a conversation with Interview Magazine, Ariana explained that taking a hiatus from music allowed her to reset creatively.
“I spent a lot of time redoing my system when it comes to making music,” she said. “With Eternal Sunshine, that felt like a very different experience for me.”
The We Can’t Be Friends hitmaker continued, “I think the time away from it helped me reclaim certain pieces of it and put certain feelings that maybe belonged to my relationship to fame, or the things that come with being an artist, in a box somewhere else, and say, ‘Okay. I don’t have to let go of this thing that I love. I can just put those things over here, and not lose sight of my gifts.'”
Ariana went on to share that her work on Wicked strengthened her emotionally and creatively.
“So I’ve just been taking baby steps towards healing my relationship to music and touring, and I think my time with Glinda and with acting really helped me build the strength to be able to do that,” she explained. “But I can’t express how grateful I am.”
The star added, “I think it just held some traumas for me before, and I feel those dissipating, and that is such an extraordinarily beautiful thing.”
