Ariana Grande needs absolute silence at the Oakland Arena. It’s the opening night of the “Eternal Sunshine” tour, and she’s standing at the round end of the long catwalk, with a loop station in front of her. This request demands a lot from the more than 17,000 people who have waited almost seven years to be in the same room with her again. She knows that herself. When she takes a lift onto the stage, she is greeted by deafening cheers. She takes it all in for a moment, blows kisses into the audience and puts her hand on her heart. “I’m almost afraid to ask for this, but could you please hold back for just this part?” Grande asks, pointing to the loop station. “It doesn’t feel like the right time to ask you for silence.” The audience responds with more noise—and then quiets down as Grande goes to work.
The first layers she records are different versions of the same lyric: “I don’t care what people say is true.” She adds higher harmonies, builds on them, layers more on top. Then move on to the next section of your live mix. Won’t break. Can’t shake. This fate. Rewrite. Deep breaths. Tight chest. Life. Death. Rewind. The words circle in ever new harmonious variations, sometimes light, sometimes more specific, sometimes with an airy “buh, buh, bum”. Once everything loads, Grande gives the audience a thumbs up. The collective voice of the hall begins like a choir – and it finally starts “Eternal Sunshine”.
It’s as if time has stood still – even though a lot has changed since the end of Grande’s last headlining tour in December 2019, not least her relationship to being a pop star and its demands. “The last ten or fifteen years are going to feel very different than the ones to come,” Grande said of her career earlier this year. “I don’t want to say anything definitive. I know I’m really looking forward to this little tour, but I don’t think something like this will happen again for a very, very, very long time.” However, there is little about the “Eternal Sunshine” tour that is actually small. It is at the same time a triumphant comeback and a supposed farewell, packed into just under two hours of audiovisual spectacle.
Setlist without compromises
The 20 minutes before “Eternal Sunshine” include Grande’s billing “Yes, And?”, which opens the set, as well as the first-ever live performance of “Positions” in front of an audience. Also featured at the beginning are the “Eternal Sunshine” tracks “The Boy Is Mine” and “Dandelion” – a bonus track from last year’s deluxe album “Brighter Days Ahead”. It goes without saying that the album takes up the lion’s share of the 23-song setlist with the “Eternal Sunshine” tour concept. But Grande is particularly dedicated to those pieces that were added after the original release in 2024. Every single deluxe track makes it into the set: “Warm,” “Twilight Zone,” “Past Life,” and “Hampstead.”
“Hampstead” isn’t a particularly standout track – especially when you consider the original “Eternal Sunshine” songs that are completely missing, such as “Don’t Wanna Break Up Again”, “True Story” and “I Wish I Hated You”. Your absence hurts. And yet, “Hampstead” has something live that the studio version completely lacks. On this stage it acts as a narrative link. Grande performs the track sitting on a stool with one leg pulled underneath her. No frills, just her and her microphone. The hits carry their weight — “Into You,” “Rain on Me,” “Break Free” — but nothing is as essential to Ariana Grande’s legacy as that voice. She appears completely in this spotlight. Pop stars usually need more under their belt, but you get the feeling she could have pulled off the whole show like that.
Still, the show she builds around “Eternal Sunshine” is decidedly physical. Not necessarily in the sense of physical exertion – the choreography Grande performs with her 12-member dance crew is inspired, but no more complex than what she’s done before. But the movements draw attention to how all these bodies enter into dialogue with one another. On “The Boy Is Mine,” Grande engages in a tense back-and-forth with a dancer—literally, with a whip between push-off and embrace.
Body, movement, dialogue
In “Past Life” six dancers lift her into the air. As she leaves the stage after “Hampstead,” two dancers perform an intimate ballet to the song’s instrumental backing track. All of this creates a certain magnifying effect – for example when Grande says “Don’t comment on my body, don’t reply” from “Yes, And?” sings, surrounded by a dozen free-flowing figures.
Grande has never made a secret of the fact that she is aware of the whispers and conjectures that accompany her public life. At the beginning of the set she makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to her time as Glinda in “Wicked” and asks: “It’s good to see us, isn’t it?”
And then of course: the divorce. Grande can’t ignore the irony in the bridge of “Thank U, Next,” where she sings about wanting to get married one day. “Only wanna do it once, real bad,” she sings, holding up two fingers and laughing. “Gon’ make that shit last.” She still knows how to land a joke in moments that leave little room for humor – but it’s also another reminder of how much has changed since we last saw her on stage.
“7 Rings” is perhaps the clearest example. Sitting in front of the picture of a bright pink house, Grande looks like a completely different artist than the one who set the internet on fire with the single in 2019. Even Positions, the album that came after this blockbuster release, seems to have been made in another life. It still gets more space on the “Eternal Sunshine” setlist than expected. Grande previously admitted to scrapping her plans for “Positions” after sensing a “that’s not what we want” sentiment from some of her fanbase.
Past and departure
She never should have listened to them – but at least the manifestation mantra “Just Like Magic” made it into the set, as did “Safety Net” and “Positions”. Some of the album’s strongest moments like “POV” and “Off the Table” are missing – but you can’t blame her for not wanting to sing love songs every night that she wrote for someone who later wrote her songs about falling in love.be inspired.
However, Grande doesn’t want to leave everything behind. The stage design for the “Eternal Sunshine” tour clearly references the visual world she built around the album in the short film “Brighter Days Ahead” – with her own version of the memory erasure clinic from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. The focus is on the flooded, burned and destroyed house from the album visuals, which despite everything is still standing. In one scene it even begins to blossom.
Between stage and costume changes, Grande continues the story. Wading hand in hand with her younger self through murky waters from the flood at the start of the show, she encounters different versions of herself who have visited the clinic to start over with a blank slate.
One is wearing her outfit from One Love Manchester, the charity concert she hosted after the bombing during the 2017 Dangerous Woman tour that killed 22 people. “One Last Time” still feels like their song together, as thousands of voices plead to bring each other home. It’s one of the most moving and uplifting moments of the entire evening. Another patient at the clinic is an even younger version of herself. The pumps-and-flared-minidress combo could only come from the “Yours Truly” era. Grande honors them with a jazzy, string-heavy version of “Honeymoon Avenue,” the opening track from her debut album. The “Sweetener” era remains unrepresented – but there isn’t a single song from it on the setlist anyway.
One last time, for a long time
Grande almost fights back tears as she thanks the fans who have stuck with her since her debut 13 years ago. The final songs of the setlist make a good case for why they are. The live debut of “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” the first single from their upcoming eighth album “Petal,” takes the studio version to a completely different level – the two versions feel like two different songs. The crucial difference: you sings here really. The vocal runs and harmonies she adds to the live version light a much-needed fire under the words she wrote. “Is it really my fault you all gave me your hearts of your own accord?” she sings. There’s a fascinating tension in this moment – the question posed to a room full of people shouting those exact words back.
If this is truly the last time Grande will share this space with them for a long time, then they need to hear her – even over the noise of her own screams. She just needs absolute silence for a moment.