“It’s pretty all-consuming,” Ariana Grande, 26, said to Vogue magazine when discussing her grief over Mac Miller. Ariana’s ex died in his Los Angeles Home in September 2018 from a drug overdose, and the loss still affects the “No Tears Left To Cry” singer to this day. “By no means was what we had perfect, but, like, f-ck. 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.”
Ariana also opened about a May 2018 tweet in which she clapped back at a fan after they blamed Mac’s arrest for drunk driving on their breakup. “shaming and blaming a woman for a man’s inability to keep his sh-t together is a very major problem. let’s please stop doing that,” she tweeted, and Ariana tells Vogue that the tweet was her expressing some pent-up frustration over a loved one’s self-destruction. “People don’t see any of the real stuff that happens, so they are loud about what they think happened,” she told Vogue.
“They didn’t see the years of work and fighting and trying, or the love and exhaustion. That tweet came from a place of complete defeat, and you have no idea how many times I warned him that that would happen and fought that fight, for how many years of our friendship, of our relationship,” she added. “You have no idea so you’re not allowed to pull that card, because you don’t f-cking know. That’s where that came from.”
Ariana’s love for her ex came out during the Pittsburgh stop of her Sweetener tour. While performing in Mac’s hometown, Ariana began to belt out some of her biggest hits, including “Raindrops,” the song supposedly about Mac. Aria, according to fans in attendance, started crying and couldn’t finish the track. She also reportedly momentarily when she got to the line about Mac in “Thank U, Next” (“Wish I could say thank you to Malcolm ’cause he was an angel”) Aria was so choked up that she was unable to say his name.
Around a week after Ariana’s concert, Miller’s posthumous track, “That’s Life,” was released. In the song, he confessed about his struggles with sobriety. “They told me don’t make a promise you can’t keep/All the drugs in your system you can’t sleep/How many times you had to buy plan B/For a girl you’d never bring back home to meet your family.”