Less than a month after Sweetener was released, Ariana Grande’s freshly-made ex-boyfriend and possible love of her life, Mac Miller, was found dead in his Studio City abode. The cause was an accidental drug overdose spurred by the pills laced with fentanyl that were sold to him. At the time of his death, Miller and Grande had only been split up for about four months, with Grande making the breakup announcement in May of 2018 just before she famously moved on to Pete Davidson.
The May of the previous year, however, Miller was very much there for Grande right when she got off the plane in the U.S. in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing. A horrific terrorist attack that took place during the May 22nd date of the Dangerous Woman Tour. Through the trauma of it all, Miller would be there to support her, even if he still had plenty of his own demons to wrestle with. As Grande kept soldiering through the tour, complete with a benefit concert called One Love Manchester that found her returning to the city in June to show her support, Miller was around to offer her a shoulder to cry on (and to perform onstage with her at the One Love event). Even if that shoulder flickered in and out along with the rest of him. Because it was obvious he was still going back to his drug use security blanket, remarking at one point during a 2017 interview with W, “I’ve spent a good time very sober and now I’m just, like, living regularly.” “Living regularly” by his standards, that is.
A lifestyle that was no longer tenable to Grande, who dealt with a major backlash in May of 2018 not only for getting together with Davidson so soon after her breakup with Miller, but also because she was blamed by many for Miller’s DUI arrest the same month, right after the media caught wind of her new relationship. In response to a viral tweet that touted that blame, Grande replied, “I am not a babysitter or a mother and no woman should feel that they need to be. I have cared for him and tried to support his sobriety & prayed for his balance for years (and always will of course) but shaming/blaming women for a man’s inability to keep his shit together is a very major problem. Let’s please stop doing that. Of course I didn’t share about how hard or scary it was while it was happening but it was.”
The scariness of it all was something Grande hadn’t fully processed, as 2018 eventually revealed. Having thrown herself into another relationship as a balm for the one didn’t work (something of her modus operandi [in addition to J. Lo’s]), she was forced to take stock after Miller’s death. And “ghostin” was a very clear indication of that. It became part of Grande’s undeniable “therapy” in the wake of trying to deal with both Miller’s demise and the revelation that maybe being engaged to Pete Davidson wasn’t the best idea. In fact, it was only a month after Miller’s overdose that Grande and Davidson called it quits. The relationship lasted a mere six months. But it was immortalized with the Sweetener track entitled, what else, “pete davidson.”
Alas, with the feelings expressed on Sweetener already feeling stale to Grande in the aftermath of all she endured, it was a little less than six months later, in February of 2019, that she had a new album out: thank u, next. Instantly acclaimed, the dissection of the album led many to immediately pinpoint the song that was most overtly about Miller: “ghostin.”
As the eighth track, the song stands out among the other eleven as the most serious and contemplative. Besides the song that appropriately follows it, “in my head,” “ghostin” sets itself apart as the most palpable lament. Perhaps it’s for this reason that Grande places it right after the more playful “make up.” The latter is a song that reduces Grande’s “erratic” behavior to something cute and intentional—because it’s just her way of building up toward hot make up sex. “ghostin” is quick to shatter that illusion. Indeed, it was so real that, for a time, Grande didn’t want it included on the record. In fact, “ghostin” fans can only thank Taylor Swift’s favorite person, Scooter Braun, that it’s on there. For, as Grande mentioned during an interview with Zach Sang, “It was a lot. It was too much, actually. I was literally begging Scooter to take it off. And he was like, ‘You’re thinking too hard now. This is special and you should share it with everybody.’” Sure, the way she tells it, it sounds a bit pushy and like maybe she was steamrolled into sharing emotions she didn’t want to, but it’s true that “ghostin” adds a rich layer to thank u, next that wouldn’t be there without it.
Her candor about still being in love with someone else—a literal ghost now—is something that many can relate to. Particularly those who have chosen to move on from a person not because they fell out of love with them, but because being with them proved to be too toxic of a situation (yes, the dichotomy is real). So it is that Grande sings, “I know that it breaks your heart when I cry again/Over him/I know that it breaks your heart when I cry again/‘Stead of ghostin’ him.” But how can Grande ghost a ghost? Not only that, how can she pretend the death of someone she loved so deeply doesn’t hurt her, even if Davidson was supposed to be her “true love” at that moment in time? Of Davidson’s patience with such an unusual scenario, Grande praises, “Baby, you do it so well/You’ve been so understanding, you’ve been so good/And I’m puttin’ you through more than one ever should/And I’m hating myself ‘cause you don’t want to/Admit that it hurts you.”
In the end, that patience and suppression of his own emotions were not enough to weather the storm of her sadness. Of dealing with a loss so great that she had to recognize maybe there was a force majeure at play in terms of preventing her engagement with Davidson to stick. Though it seemed, at first, she was doing her best to ignore what her feelings were inherently telling her, opening the song with, “I know you hear me when I cry/I try to hold it in at night/While you’re sleeping next to me…/Look at the cards that we’ve been dealt/If you were anybody else/Probably wouldn’t last a day/Every tear’s a rain parade from hell.” And this after Grande had truly believed on Sweetener that she had “no tears left to cry.”
Grande then gets even more raw by confessing, “Though I wish he were here instead/Don’t want that living in your head/He just comes to visit me/When I’m dreaming every now and then.” It is this lyric in particular that many have speculated to be a foil for Miller’s verse in “Cinderella” that goes, “You in my dreams, that’s why I sleep all the time.” The addition to that being “Just to hear you say I love you, just to touch you, just to leave you behind.” It’s the “just to leave you behind” line that feels retroactively ominous. As though Miller knew somehow, one way or the other, he would be the person to truly leave the relationship, even if she left him first. But in a far less literal way. Miller’s haunting quality also intensifies with another lyric toward the end of the song when he forewarns, “Well, wherever you came from, wherever you goin’/I promise I’m not far behind, yeah/So don’t you dare throw this away.” Based on “ghostin,” Grande definitely didn’t. Or couldn’t.
On the song that follows it, “in my head,” her reconciliation with the fact that she tried to paint Davidson in an image and light that suited her immediate needs manifests in the lines, “Painted a picture/I thought I knew you well.” This inversely mimics the lyrics on “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” when she declares, “I don’t like how you paint me, yet I’m still here hanging.” Just as Miller is still there hanging in the corners of Grande’s mind—no matter how far recessed. His image likely elevated in the way that can only happen when someone dies, and glorification tends to be the natural reaction.
With the passing of one album, Positions, released in between thank u, next and Eternal Sunshine, Grande evidently had time to reassess her take on otherworldly phenomena. For while “ghostin” laments the power of the supernatural, “supernatural” reveres it. Sees it as a divine blessing. Placed on the record as the sixth track, it follows “eternal sunshine,” one of several flagrant “divorce songs” aimed at Dalton Gomez (so much for “Only wanna do it [a.k.a. get married] once, real bad/Gon’ make that shit last”). So it is that Eternal Sunshine feels structured to reveal Grande’s emotional state as it progressed from being “over” her marriage and feeling rather stifled by it to falling for, of all people, Ethan Slater (her Munchkin-playing co-star in Wicked). Which is why, after singing things like, “So I try to wipe my mind/Just so I feel less insane/Rather feel painless/I’d rather forget than know, know for sure/What we could’ve fought through behind this door/So I close it and move,” she does move—right on to the vibrant, bright tone of “supernatural.”
If a mournful haunting was the theme of “ghostin,” then “supernatural” is all about letting the spectral take hold with joy. After mentioning the “good boy” who’s “on [her] side” in “eternal sunshine,” that “good boy” becomes the full star of “supernatural.” And yes, things get expectedly raunchy as they often do with Grande, who tells Slater, “I want you to come claim it, I do/What are you waiting for?/Yeah, I want you to name it, I do/Want you to make it yours.” Just as long as Slater doesn’t name it something like “Rebecca” à la Charlotte York in Sex and the City. Elsewhere, she lasciviously insists, “Nothin’ еlse felt this way inside me.” But in between those lyrics alluding to sexual chemistry, Grande finds time to make the lyrical theme slightly sweeter (adding a “sweetener,” if you will) via the chorus: “This love’s possessin’ me, but I don’t mind at all/It’s like supernatural/It’s takin’ over me, don’t wanna fight the fall/It’s like supernatural.”
Thus, there’s a far more exuberant aura to the notion of supernatural forces being at play in her love life. As for Grande making her seventh album themed around Michel Gondry’s 2004 movie, eerily enough, Mac Miller cited Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as his second favorite film in a 2013 article for Complex. Of the movie’s high-up placement on his list, Miller commented, “I love Jim Carrey when he’s being serious. He killed this role. Whenever I’m talking to a girl, I always tell them to watch Eternal Sunshine. It cuts deep.” Grande would tend to agree, obviously.
Other themes from thank u, next crop up again on Eternal Sunshine, too—like Grande saying, “I met someone else/And we havin’ better discussions/I know they say I move on too fast/But this one gon’ last/‘Cause her name is Ari/And I’m so good with that.” A sologamist sentiment that reappears on “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” with the lines, “So for now, it’s only me/And maybe that’s all I need.” Except, as history has shown, Grande has a tendency to be a serial monogamist rather than a comfortable-in-her-own-skin sologamist. Perhaps being perennially haunted by past relationships has something to do with that. For nothing staves off the bitter realities of an old relationship like the celestial nature of a new one.
