Ariana Grande

Vocal range as a professional tool

Ariana Grande made her debut on a Broadway stage before global audiences knew where to place her. In 2008, she joined the cast of the musical 13, and that theater training shaped her discipline going forward. She was not a teen chasing fast fame through talent contests. She had a solid technical foundation and a four-octave range that let her hit whistle notes with mathematical precision.

In 2010, Nickelodeon hired her to play Cat Valentine in the series Victorious. The role required her to dye her hair an intense red every two weeks to keep it visually consistent. That chemical process damaged her natural hair for years, but it made her a face recognized by millions of teens. Even so, she was already recording demos in her spare time, because her priority had always been the music industry.

She released her first studio album, titled Yours Truly, in 2013. The album debuted at number one on the U.S. charts, and technical critics praised her ability to emulate 1990s R&B. It sold 138,000 copies in its first week without any prior international tour.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2014, she released My Everything and chose to work with top producers such as Max Martin. She was looking for a more electronic, bigger sound that would definitively move her away from her image as a children's TV star. The marketing strategy focused on her ability to alternate powerful ballads with aggressive dance beats.

Maturing at the mixing board

The album Dangerous Woman arrived in 2016 and marked a break from her previous aesthetic. She began getting directly involved in the songwriting and string arrangements of her tracks. Her live shows gained technical complexity, and her sound team had to adjust the monitoring systems to protect her hearing from the power of her own high notes.

In 2018, she worked with Pharrell Williams on the album Sweetener. The producer was looking for unconventional rhythmic structures, and she took on the challenge of singing over beats that broke the mold of traditional pop. The album won the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2019 ceremony.

Just six months later, she released Thank U, Next. She recorded most of the material in just two weeks with her closest friends at a studio in New York. The result was an unprecedented commercial hit that made her the first solo artist to hold the top three spots on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time.

She never stopped to look at the numbers.

During 2020, she released Positions under production conditions limited by global travel restrictions. The album explored sounds closer to trap and classic soul. On this project, she personally handled the engineering of the vocal layers and spent hours editing her own harmonies in the recording software.

A return to her theater roots

In 2021, she learned she would play Glinda in the film adaptation of the musical Wicked. The production decided to split the story into two feature films so no material from the original libretto would be cut. She spent much of 2022 and 2023 living in London for the shoot under director Jon M. Chu.

She had to retrain her voice to regain the lyric range required for the role of Glinda. The preproduction process was exhaustive and forced her to step away from music stages for nearly three years. But she used the pauses of the 2023 actors' strike to write new music for her album.

She released her seventh album Eternal Sunshine in March 2024. The album's visual and narrative concept was inspired by Michel Gondry's film, released twenty years earlier. The lead single hit number one in more than twelve countries during its first week on streaming platforms.

The first part of the film Wicked was released in November 2024. The second installment of the film project has its release date set for November 2025. The estimated budget of the joint production exceeded 145 million dollars in initial investment.