- Ariana Grande's debut album "Yours Truly" turns 10 years old this month.
- The fan-favorite track "Tattooed Heart" was cowritten by Sean Foreman, one-half of the punk-pop duo 3OH!3.
Ariana Grande broke into music 10 years ago with a doe-eyed image and doo-wop melodies.
So it may come as a surprise that Grande, early in the creation of her debut album, enlisted a cowriter whose claim to fame hinged on the memorable lyric, "You tell your boyfriend if he says he's got beef / That I'm a vegetarian and I ain't fucking scared of him."
At the time, Grande was still best known for playing Cat Valentine in the Nickelodeon series "Victorious" and its spin-off "Sam & Cat."
Sean Foreman, on the other hand, had risen to prominence as one-half of 3OH!3.
Cofounded with producer Nathaniel Motte and named after their Colorado area code, the electro-punk duo thrived in the irreverent era of MySpace and Cobra Starship. Their 2008 single "Don't Trust Me" (stylized as "DONTTRUSTME") went five-times platinum and earned needle drops in popular shows like "Pretty Little Liars" and "The Vampire Diaries."
"I wasn't really familiar with her on the Nickelodeon show or anything," Foreman said of his introduction to Grande. "I was just like, 'Alright, I know nothing. I'm just going to take it. If she's cool with me, then I'm cool with her.'"
'Tattooed Heart' began as a simple idea in Foreman's Notes app
Grande has said she began work on "Yours Truly" in 2010, when she was just 17 years old.
In the early stages, Matt Squire was recruited to help guide production. He had previously worked on Grande's debut single, "Put Your Hearts Up," as well as 3OH!3's breakout album "Want." So in February 2012, Squire combined unlikely forces, inviting the 3OH!3 guys to join Grande for two days in the studio.
Squire described the direction as "kind of like 'Put Your Hearts Up,'" Foreman said. "But he said she's really talented, she can rap, she can do all kinds of stuff."
Despite building his brand on the Warped Tour circuit, Foreman was also gaining steam as a pop-star whisperer. He had already cowritten Kesha's "Blah Blah Blah" and toured with Katy Perry. This assignment should've been a snap.
But a modern Arianator will know that Grande wasn't necessarily on the same page. She has tried her best to scrub "Put Your Hearts Up" from the internet, describing the song as "inauthentic and fake" — a half-baked attempt to appease her Nickelodeon audience.
"The first day, I believe we worked on a song that was like, what we were briefed to aim for," Foreman recalled. "It was very far off from... It was basically just very pop."
Foreman said he could tell that Grande's heart wasn't in it. And indeed, as far as he knows, that first song has never emerged from the vault. The session had been a bust.
But Foreman wasn't ready to give up. Later that afternoon, he brainstormed new concepts in his Notes app, including a few lines about falling "in like," a timeless teenage love story: "I never want to start / If in the end / I'll need to change the name / In my tattooed heart."
The next day, Motte was running late, so Foreman and Grande began bouncing ideas around. He said he took her through his Notes app, rapid-fire style.
"She was like, 'Oh, that's really cool. I like the tattooed-heart idea,'" he recalled.
"I was like, 'Well, it feels like a throwback. It feels sort of like a doo-wop,'" he continued. "It wasn't conceptually what we were trying to do, but we were like, 'We already did one of those types of songs, like the pop thing. So let's try one that we like.'"
Foreman described the song's creation as a "real artist to writer" symbiosis, and compared the sonic inspiration to Ben E. King's soul classic "Stand By Me." He said the song was pretty much done by the end of the day.
"I would throw out lyrics, or she would, but then she would just sing it in a way that obviously, I'm not capable of," he explained. "It was one of the most organic writing sessions I've ever had."
"Thankfully, Ari, she worked in the room. She was there," he continued. "And I really love that, when you're working one-on-one with an artist, and it's not just pitching. Because usually, you get a brief on what the A&R is looking for. And if I'm being honest, a lot of the time, it's not what ends up being the album."
10 years later, it's still one of Grande's most beloved songs
Grande unveiled "Yours Truly" on August 30, 2013.
Although it was never officially promoted as a single, "Tattooed Heart" quickly became a fan-favorite from the album. To date, it has racked up more Spotify streams than high-profile duets like "Right There" and "Popular Song."
It seems that "Tattooed Heart" has remained a personal favorite of Grande's, too. She performed the song at the 2013 American Music Awards and later for the Obama family at the White House.
The song has also remained a staple on Grande's setlists, all the way through the Sweetener World Tour in 2019, her most recent run of live shows.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of "Yours Truly," Grande is releasing a series of performance videos for a select few tracks. Naturally, one of them is "Tattooed Heart," which will arrive Tuesday.
"I know she loved it," Foreman said. "I mean, she even got a tattoo, literally a tattooed heart. And I think it meant a lot to her."
Still, the lyricist had no idea that "Tattooed Heart" would even make the cut for Grande's album. After that fateful day in the studio, he didn't receive any updates from her team.
Remember, this was before "Stay With Me," before "Love on the Brain." This was a radio landscape dominated by LMFAO, Calvin Harris, and dubstep. There were no guarantees for a songwriter who wasn't aiming for a smash — especially one who turned in a ballad that wouldn't sound out of place at a '50s prom.
"You'd be crazy as a songwriter, to go in with an artist, and not try to write the big single," Foreman said. "But I thought that's why it was successful. Because it was what we both, at that time, really wanted to write. It wasn't forced."
At some point in the album's creative process, Grande began working with R&B producers like Harmony Samuels and Babyface, who collected '90s hits like candy. "Yours Truly" took a new shape, woozier, bluesier, molded in the likeness of stars like Mariah Carey and Amy Winehouse.
Against all odds, "Tattooed Heart" remained firmly on the tracklist. A few additional producers, like Grande's longtime friends The Rascals, made tweaks and adjustments to the original demo — but if Foreman's memory serves, the core of the song is very much intact.
"The first time I realized that 'Tattooed Heart' was on the album was the day it came out," Foreman said. "This is the life of a songwriter. Sometimes you touch down, you have a moment, you write something that's special, and then you're just completely shot out of the orbit of what it is."
"The moment you live for is just the moment of conception," he added. "And then you have to let it live its own life."