Ariana Grande threw it back to the ’90s while giving love to icons Monica and Brandy on her new album, Eternal Sunshine.
Grande, 30, unleashed her highly anticipated album on Friday, March 8. As she hinted in interviews leading up to its arrival, Eternal Sunshine is full of allusions to her split from ex-husband Dalton Gomez and the new romance she struck up with her Wicked costar Ethan Slater following their respective splits.
One seeming nod to Slater, 31, is “The Boy Is Mine,” a song that not only shares its name with the song Brandy, 45, and Monica, 43, released in 1998 but also interpolates the classic R&B hit.
“I’m usually so unproblematic / So independent / Tell me why / ‘Cause the boy is mine, mine,” Grande sings in the first verse. In the chorus, she repeats how the titular boy is hers, how she “can’t wait to try him,” adding, “The stars, they aligned / The boy is minе.”
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Grande revealed the process of making “The Boy Is Mine” when she spoke with Zane Lowe for Apple Music. In the interview shared on Thursday, March 7, Grande said that this song represents her trying out a new musical perspective. “It’s kind of like, ‘OK, I’ll play the bad girl, here’s your bad-girl anthem,’” she said, adding that the track is a sister song to “True Story,” another tune on Eternal Sunshine.
Grande went on to say that she “always wanted to reimagine” Monica and Brandy’s “The Boy Is Mine” in “some kind of way.” The original track topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 13 weeks in 1998 and is an R&B staple.
“I kind of was like, ‘This is a very bad idea, I think, but there is a large group of my fans that really, they do love a bad-girl anthem,’” said Grande. “And this is kind of an elevated version of that.”
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Grande previously said her “The Boy Is Mine” repurposed parts of “Fantasize,” an unreleased track of hers that leaked in 2023, reportedly making it to the Philippines’ Spotify Daily Top Songs before it was pulled from the platform. The song went viral on TikTok, which prompted Grande to address it. She said she initially wrote the track “for a comedy sketch about a girl group,” per Teen Vogue, and that she was “going to come back to this hook to use eventually.”
“The Boy Is Mine” is “Ariana’s version” of “Fantasize,” she explained to Zach Sang in a February 26 interview. “They’re completely different now,” she continued. “So although you’ve heard them — because you stole them — they’re very different now.”
