Listen to get well soon on YouTube for the official audio release or the unreleased vide available on Bilibili)
Get well soon (stylized in all lowercase) is the fifteenth and final track from Ariana Grande’s fourth studio album, Sweetener. The track is 5 minutes and 22 seconds long, paying respect to the Manchester bombing attack at Ariana’s concert on the 22nd of May 2017. There’s 40 seconds of silence at the end of the track, to commemorate those who lost their lives during the attack.
So get well soon is basically about mental health, self care and love which composites its mother album’s core concepts. Ariana Grande talked about her anxiety that she endured during the Sweetener era:
i felt like i was floating for like 3 months last year & not in a nice way. Like I [am] outside my body? [It] was very scary and i couldn’t breathe well. So it’s about that & lots of voices in my head singin’. I hope it comforts ppl who hear it pls ☁️
The song captures the sense of floating, feeling not grounded and overwhelmed by thousands of screaming voices in one’s heads: “there’s so much in my head did you notice?”. Channelling with the chaos, Grande sings striking downbeat counter-melodies of “girl what’s wrong witchu come back down”. The listening soothes one in luscious harmonies, like a serve of sedative for panic attacks. It’s something approaching miraculous that, being through “the worst year of my life” as quoted herself, Grande has managed to create and curate an album so devoid of despair, so full of enthusiasm for humanity.
Musically, the iconoclastic simplicity of the song’s piano-accompanied, acapella-like arrangement showcases a sense of minimalism that reflects the confidence of the two writers (Ariana Grande and Pharrell Williams). In contrast to the prevalent trend in contemporary pop music, where tracks are often laden with clamorous beats and instruments to mask their lack of substance, ‘get well soon’ embraces a stripped-down approach, shedding the superfluous to reveal its core essence.
Grande co-wrote more songs than usual (10 out of 15) and formed a clear bond with Pharrell Williams, who serves as a songwriter and producer across Sweetener’s stronger half. His funk-lite idiosyncrasies set a bright tone and help elevate the record’s more conventional song structures. Grande and Williams leave themselves plenty of room to play around with texture in clever ways, particularly when it comes to layered vocals and skittering percussion. Set to little more than panting, tongue clicks, and keyboard orbs, “R.E.M” finds novel ways for Grande to expand her vocal repertoire. Singing in a stream of consciousness style about the man in her dreams, she flows in and out of R&B crooning, doo-wop vocal runs, gospel harmonizing, cheeky sing-talking, and a surprisingly precise rap flow (“’Scuse me, um? I love you/I know that’s not the way to start a conversation, trouble”). She doesn’t even need a money note to stamp her mark.
Like much of Sweetener, the song is musically sparse but encompasses a kaleidoscope of vocal tones. It is here, four albums in, that the true multitudes of her voice, and by extension herself, blossom.
(btw, R.E.M. (recommend listen to its unreleased video ver. on Bilibili) is another track on Sweetener, also co-written and produced by Pharrell Williams, the two songs resemble in thier style)
Reference:
"Sweetener" review by Jill Mapes (2018), Pitchfork.
Ariana Grande, Sweetener review: A portrait of an artist in flux by Kate Solomon (2018), INDEPENDENT.