During a wide-ranging new podcast, Ariana Grande has opened up about the uproar over her so-called changing voice, fans’ interpretations of her most personal songs, and more.
This week, Ariana appeared on the Shut Up Evan podcast alongside host Evan Ross Katz.
Covering a range of topics, Ari firstly discussed her latest album, Eternal Sunshine, and her decision to keep her song lyrics cryptic.
Eternal Sunshine, released in March this year, featured several songs widely speculated to be about Ariana’s divorce from Dalton Gomez and her current relationship with Ethan Slater, which got off to a controversial start.
Addressing fans’ interpretations of her music now, Ari said on the Shut Up Evan podcast, “They took it how they took it. They have so many of their own interpretations of this music.”
“There are still a lot of misconceptions,” she said before quipping, “I guess it wasn’t too direct.”
Ariana continued, “It’s a tricky thing to balance and to navigate because I do want to express my feelings [and] my experiences, but I also want to protect the details of my life.”
“I feel pretty grateful for how [the album] ended up,” she said before revealing that she tweaked the project multiple times to make sure it was as “protective” as possible.
“Protecting my peace and my privacy and the actual details...is actually far more important than [letting people in],” she said.
Speaking of protecting her peace elsewhere, Ariana also shared her true feelings about doing interviews.
Ariana admitted that she used to deem interviews “unsafe” when she was younger due to having her comments misconstrued by the press.
“There were all these stories coming out of nowhere that were completely false,” she said. “And that was, at 19 years old, the most impossible thing to acclimate to.”
“I hate overusing the word traumatic, but...it freaked me out,” she added.
Meanwhile, Ariana also addressed her recent viral voice change moment.
Ariana ended up addressing the uproar in a TikTok comment. She said, “habit (speaking like this for two years) and also vocal health :) 🍵 i intentionally change my vocal placement (high / low) often depending on how much singing i’m doing 😭 i’ve always done this BYE.”
Now addressing the buzz again, Ariana said that changing voices is ”a normal thing that people do.”
“Especially if you have a large range, that’s a normal thing,” she said before pointing out that she’s spent a long time speaking in character as Glinda while shooting Wicked.
“Another thing that is really real is that I did just spend a long time playing a character every single day and training my voice to do different things,” she shared.
“The voice is in the body; it’s an instrument, and muscle memory is a real thing. That’s a normal thing for people who, it’s their job to transform,” she said.
Ariana went on to suggest that male actors who change their voices for roles are hardly ever met with the same criticism that she’s faced for embodying the character of Glinda.
“You see male actors — sure, people make jokes here and there as well about everybody who experiences something like this — but it’s always after the fact that they’re like, ‘Oh, wow, how dedicated to his craft. What an amazing transformation! He’s a brilliant performer!'” she said. “And God forbid I sneeze like Glinda.”
“I had a job to do,” she added. “People change and habits happen. It’s a strange thing to be under such a microscope.”