In 2016, three years after they collaborated on their hit song “My Way,” Ariana Grande and Mac Miller started dating.
They were together for two years, and after they split Ariana revealed that she’d spent “years” trying to “support his sobriety” to no avail. While they were unable to make a romantic relationship work, she maintained that she had “unconditional love” for Mac.
At the time, she called him one of her “best friends in the whole world and favorite people on the planet.” Ariana added: “Unconditional love is not selfish. It is wanting the best for that person even if at the moment, it’s not you.”
The pair remained on good terms up until his death in September 2018, with Mac dying from a drug overdose. In April last year, Ryan Michael Reavis was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for supplying the dealer who sold Mac the drugs.
Ariana has always been open about how heartbroken she was by Mac’s death. In an Instagram tribute that was posted soon after the news broke, she wrote: “i adored you from the day i met you when i was nineteen and i always will.”
“i can’t believe you aren’t here anymore. i really can’t wrap my head around it,” she went on. “we talked about this. so many times. i’m so mad, i’m so sad i don’t know what to do. you were my dearest friend. for so long. above anything else. i’m so sorry i couldn’t fix or take your pain away. i really wanted to.”
Describing Mac, Ariana added: “the kindest, sweetest soul with demons he never deserved. i hope you’re okay now. rest.”
In an interview with Vogue almost a year after Mac died, Ariana said: “He was the best person ever, and he didn’t deserve the demons he had. I was the glue for such a long time, and I found myself becoming... less and less sticky. The pieces just started to float away.”
And the star has been sure to keep the rapper’s memory alive through her projects ever since, with sweet tributes to him found in both her makeup range and music.
In November 2018, just two months after Mac’s death, Ariana name-checked him in her hit single “Thank U, Next,” using his legal name Malcolm McCormick.
Reflecting on her past lovers, Ariana sings: “Wish I could say ‘thank you’ to Malcolm / ‘Cause he was an angel.”
Fans spotted more references to Mac when she released her album, Thank U, Next, in February 2019, with many listeners particularly taken aback by Ariana’s vulnerability in the eighth track, “Ghostin.”
This heartbreaking song details the complicated feelings that Ariana had as she grieved for Mac while in a relationship with Pete Davidson.
Ariana and Pete started dating in May 2018, but split in October that same year as she struggled to cope with her loss.
Pete later revealed in an interview with Charlamagne tha God that he knew his and Ariana’s relationship was over as soon as he heard about Mac’s passing.
The comic said that he supported her as best as he could up until the moment she no longer wanted him around.
“I think I said, ‘I’ll be here until you don’t want me to be here,” Pete recalled at the time. “I pretty much knew it was around over after that. That was really horrible, and I can’t imagine what that shit is like. All I do know is that she really loved the shit out of him, and she wasn’t putting on a show or anything.”
And Ariana acknowledges this in “Ghostin,” where she praises Pete for being “so understanding” and supportive in the situation as she admits that she knows that it hurts him when she continuously cries about her ex.
Elsewhere, she sings: “I know you hear me when I cry / I try to hold it in the night / While you're sleepin' next to me / But it's your arms that I need this time.”
Later in the song, Ariana confesses that she wishes Mac was with her instead of Pete, but she doesn’t want Pete to know that.
Soon after “Ghostin” was released on her album, Ariana admitted in an interview that she really didn’t want it to be made public.
In fact, the star said that she was “begging” her manager, Scooter Braun, to take it off the tracklist because it is so emotional and personal to her.
During her 2019 appearance on the Zach Sang Show, Ariana said of “Ghostin”: “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.’”
“And I was like: ‘I’m just gonna let go,’” the singer added. “I wanted to take a couple of things off the album. But I ended up just keeping most of them.”
This interview recently resurfaced on TikTok, and fans have been left outraged by the fact that she was forced into releasing such an intimate and vulnerable song to the world.
Some admitted that they can’t even listen to “Ghostin” because it feels too invasive, and they accused Scooter of being “disrespectful” and taking advantage of Ariana’s trauma.
“Beautiful song but scooter is the worst for pushing her to keep it on the album when she didn’t want to,” one person commented. Another agreed: “I feel so bad for her. ghostin is so beautiful and special but the meaning is sad and personal. I hate pushy people like scooter.”
Someone else added: “Ghostin is one of my fav songs like I love it sm but he should’ve taken it off, like that’s wrong and so disrespectful of him.”
One more echoed: “I love ghostin but I feel like if someone doesn’t wanna release something that personal they shouldn’t have to.”
“it feels so personal and intimate bc it literally felt like she let us read her journal or something,” someone else said of the song. Another comment read: “It gets me so mad that he did that, you can hear the pain in the song.”
One fan admitted: “I always skip this song bc it felt too personal and I felt like I invaded het privacy listening to ghostin :(“
“She was traumatized and he took advantage of it to sell records,” one more said of Scooter. Another agreed: “Hope she leaves him and finds someone who has her mental health as their best interest, scooter capitalized of her trauma.”
Ariana has worked with Scooter since she signed to his management company in 2013, and by 2016 he was handling every aspect of her career.
But in 2019 it was revealed that Ariana had fired him for six months after he apparently overstepped the mark in her personal life.
A source told US weekly at the time: “He definitely gets involved in his clients’ business and personal relationships. At one point, Ariana fired him because she had had it.”
Scooter addressed this and his and Ariana’s subsequent reconciliation in an interview with Variety, where he blamed one of Ariana’s boyfriends for him losing his job.
While he did not reveal their identity, he said: “When shitty boyfriends leave, she starts to see the light on some stuff, and one day I got a phone call.”
“I went over there and we had a very honest conversation. Where it made me a better manager,” Scooter went on. “Number one, it allowed me to know that I can be fired — I had never been fired before.”
