If faced with the choice to erase one’s most painful memories or live with them forever, à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you’d be forgiven for wanting to wipe them away. On the first night of a five-show run in Los Angeles promoting her 2024 album Eternal Sunshine, Ariana Grande riffed on the idea of memory erasure in an emotive, occasionally zany show that illuminated one of her hardest-won revelations: forgetting her most painful experiences isn’t a bargain she is willing to make.
Grande has weathered tragedy and heartbreak in the public eye since her teenage years, including the death of her former boyfriend Mac Miller and the Manchester bombing that killed 22 fans at one of her concerts in 2017. She’s touched on these devastating events on past lyrics, but Eternal Sunshine marks the moment it all caught up to her. She’s spoken about the astrological concept of her Saturn return as making these challenges impossible to deny; Grande joins a long lineage of musicians, from Gwen Stefani to SZA, who have created music in the wake of this stultifying cosmic event, and the conceptually dazzling show’s 23-song setlist leaned heavily on cuts from the album. The show felt especially momentous given that Grande hadn’t been on tour since 2019, and she has since starred in two back-to-back Wicked films and judged The Voice.
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