Ariana Grande Isn’t Sure She’ll See You on Tour — But Will Definitely See Music Leakers in Jail

Larisha Paul
·3 min read
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Ariana Grande - Credit: Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Ariana Grande - Credit: Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

For right now, it’s a little too early to start planning out an outfit for Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine tour. In 2020, she floated the idea of performing another double-album tour, as she did with Sweetener and Thank U, Next in 2019. In this case, the upcoming album, out March 8, would be paired with 2020’s Positions. But in a recent interview with the Zach Sang Show, Grande expressed uncertainty around her return to touring.

“I think that I was buying myself time — I didn’t want to do that,” she said about the idea of taking two albums on the road again. “I was like, yeah, and then the album will never happen, and then the tour will never — no, no, no. I’m kidding.” Grande clarified that she has every hope of returning to the stage and reuniting with her fans but added that she’s approaching the task with caution.

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“I had a really hard time emotionally on my last tour, but I think that’s because of where I was at,” she explained. “So just like with music, I think I’m really excited to redefine my relationship to shows when I’m ready and to see what that looks like.” In 2024, Grande will be promoting Eternal Sunshine while also preparing for the November release of Wicked, in which she stars as Galinda. Grande mentioned that, in light of this, any new live performance schedule would be more brief than past tours, adding: “I also am not ready to announce any sort of thing or get people too excited because I don’t want to disappoint.”

But while fans will have time to sort out the general aesthetic for whatever tour will follow, a certain subset of people who have been leaking Grande’s music online already have their outfit picked out for them: an orange jumpsuit.

“Before I left for wicked, the few studio sessions that I did — which are all over TikTok, thank you so much. I’ll see you in jail, literally,” Grande noted, cutting herself off with slight annoyance. One of those songs, an R&B song called “Fantasize,” began making its rounds on the video app last year.

“Those were all written for a TV show, for this thing that was not for me. So “Fantasize” comes out,” she started before cutting herself off again. “Comes out. Crazy. Was stolen — thieves, pirates, illegal. I’ll pay you more to put it away, to get it back.” Grande described the song as a “parody of a Nineties girl group,” but noted that she did pay attention to what people liked about it and incorporated those ideas into Eternal Sunshine. “But completely different now,” she clarified. “So although you’ve heard them — because you stole them, again —they’re very different.”

So far, the only taste of Eternal Sunshine that Grande has shared is the lead single “Yes, And,” on which she interrogates the public’s preoccupation with being in her business. Stepping back into the world of music after spending so long living in the world of Oz, the singer has been readjusting to how she is positioned beneath a microscope.

“We know this about the tabloids and about the media. Am I crazy? Don’t we know this? We selectively remember that this is what the tabloids do to people, especially women, based on whether or not we like the person,” Grande explained. “We selectively leave space for humanness, for nuance, they don’t leave space for that — well, they do for their friends and their family, it’s selective. They turn it off when that aligns with the version of a person they have in their head that they want to believe is true.”

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