Ariana Grande mentioned in one of her recent interviews (part of the Yours Truly 10th-anniversary Q&A sessions) that recording Yours Truly took her three years:
It took me three years to record Yours Truly. I was simultaneously shooting Victorious and, you know, I would go at night or I would go on the weekends and yeah. It was really fun but also to take that much time with it.
It felt nice. What a lovely three years.
And about the music video of the song “the Way”:
We had no budget, didn’t even tell the label that we’re gonna do it. Made it ourselves. We said like, “Listen, we have a camera we have a projector. We have music, we have balloons we got dancers, Brian and Scott.
We didn’t have any budget and anything and we just made it, showed it to the label after that. Because before they brought it up to me, were like, we need to shoot a music video. And I was like oh yeah we already did it. Here you go, what do you think. And they were like this is so fun…
Oh, so that’s how she worked out her debute album Yours Truly! It was beautiful, but, like any beginning, imperfections and frictions are part of the process. Clearly, not everything starts off flawlessly, and Ariana’s casual honesty about it is refreshing. Though she said it with so much ease, the reality must be that her early career, before she became the Queen of streaming, likely had its share of challenges.
One aspect of Ariana that I admire is her authenticity. She’s very much an existentialist. In one of her backstage behind-the-scenes moments, she nervously practiced one of her incredibly challenging riffs before going on stage. It hit me—this is exactly what I do before concerts too! It’s both comforting and hugely motivating to see one of the world’s best artists displaying vulnerabilities. Behind every outstanding performance lies a long and diligent routine of preparation and practice. There’s always struggle and a tremendous amount of effort beneath the surface.
Ariana Grande’s attitude also serves as an inspiration. In one of my research projects, a co-worker (referred to as the “engineer” hereafter) had been procrastinating on writing a heuristic algorithm. This algorithm was crucial for our numerical research and needed testing on real-world data. He kept finding excuses and making no progress.
As the person responsible for all the math and paperwork in the project, I wasn’t inclined to do his job. However, after watching Ariana’s recent interview (the one about Yours Truly), I thought, “Enough is enough. I’m going to get it done, no matter what.” Just like how she approached her “the Way” music video.
So I took a Sunday afternoon, sat down at Peet’s Coffee and wrote the code - and turns out it’s not a problem, at all. If that nasty little cute engineer’s gonna say anything about my code and algorithm WITHOUT offering any practical advice… I doubt he will, cause he just can’t - nobody questions my code. Nah just kidding… It’s a heuristic, and heuristics are meant to be developed in a magical afternoon. If it takes any longer, it’s not a heuristic—it will be the next full-blown research paper.