Throughout the summer of 2018, the “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored” singer Ariana Grande, 25, and her Saturday Night Live ex-fiancé Pete Davidson, 25, were seemingly as strong as ever from their PDA and social media interactions. However, Ariana revealed in a new interview with The Zach Sang Show that dropped on Feb. 9 that the couple experienced breaking up and getting back together before ending things for good. The on-and-off nature of their relationship actually affected her work – “thank u, next” had a few versions that changed as Ari’s relationship status did!
“In my relationship at the time, things were like up and down, and on and off,” Ariana said. “So I didn’t know what was gonna happen [with ‘thank u, next’]. And then we got back together, so I had to make a different version of it, and then we broke up again. So we ended up going with that version. There was a version where I was getting married, there was a version where I’m not getting married, there was a version with nothing [in which] we’re not talking about anything, but we all knew that the first version was gonna be the version we ultimately went with.”
Ari said that the first version they recorded was the one in which she name-dropped her exes Big Sean, 30, Ricky Alvarez, 26, Pete, and Mac Miller, who passed away in Sept. 2018 at age 26. In the version where she mentioned no one, the line instead called out her perceived image of having “too many boyfriends.” But eventually, with the end of her engagement, Ari and her team of writers and producers thought the best version was the first – in which she named her most high-profile relationships. “It became super real, you know what I mean,” Ari said. “Putting it in a song made it very, ‘Ok cool we just closed that chapter.'”
The final version of the song ended up saying: “Thought I’d end up with Sean/But he wasn’t a match/Wrote some songs about Ricky/Now I listen and laugh/Even almost got married/And for Pete, I’m so thankful/Wish I could say, ‘Thank you’ to Malcolm/’Cause he was an angel.”
We can’t imagine the song any other way, so we’re happy Ari decided to take a chance and name-drop the people who have meant so much to her in her life! And even though Pete has seemed to shade Ari recently by covering up his tattoo for her with the word “cursed,” we’re glad she has taken the high road in regards to her prior relationships by saying “thank u, next!”
