(Billboard)
Ariana Grande opens up about family, fame and freakiness in a new Billboard cover story.
“I think people see me as a little cutesy thing, but I’m literally the most sardonic person you’ve ever met,” she tells the magazine.
It all started when she was “a very weird little girl.”
Wow.
What was she like?
“Dark and deranged. I always wanted to have skeleton face paint on or be wearing a Freddy Krueger mask, and I would carry a hockey stick around,” recalls Grande. “I was like a mini-Helena Bonham Carter.”
She adds, “For my fifth birthday party we had a Jaws theme and all my friends left crying. I mean, I still am that way. But when I was little it was more concerning. There was a stage, when I was 3 or 4, where my mom thought I might grow up to be a serial killer.”
That wasn’t her only prominent trait as a little kid.
“I am hypoglycemic so sometimes I’ll get anxious if I forget to eat,” explains Grande. “When I was a little girl, I would turn into the Tasmanian devil.”
Family is important to the performer, and the recent loss of her grandfather hit Grande hard.
“I don’t even know what I would say to be able to encompass what an amazing man he was,” she tells Billboard.
Grande explains that her grandpa helped influence her tastes: “I have an obsession with all things vintage and classic and old-school, everything from Marlene Dietrich to Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons to Connie Francis.”
Her relationship with her father is more complicated.
“Everybody with divorced parents knows what it’s like to be in the middle,” she says. “Even years later I’m still in the middle.”
Grande left behind Catholicism as a child, explaining that she “departed from that and started practicing my own things when I was around 12 years old.”
One of those things is Kabbalah, which Madonna, one of her idols, also practices.
“As a fellow Kabbalist, I know how hard it is to exercise those tools in your everyday life,” says Grande. “Especially in a world where everything is so egocentric and all you do is talk about yourself and promote yourself.”
There’s a spirituality to much of what she does, including her affinity for soul music.
Grande explains, “I honestly think it could be a past-life thing. You know those things where you love something but you don’t know why, or you’re scared of something but you don’t know why? I feel like all of those things are from another life.”
As she becomes incredibly famous, the singer is encountering all sorts of new challenges.
“I never thought it would be a thing for me to go out in my pajamas,” she says.
Does she want to hide her personal life?
She tells the outlet, “I do and sometimes I don’t. I vacillate between saying, ‘I need to keep some things private’ and ‘I should be able to be myself, and I need to share what I love and everything with the world!’”
What do you think about what Grande has to say?
