After Grammys producer Ken Ehrlich took to press to assert Pop star Ariana Grande had pulled out of a scheduled performance on this Sunday’s (February 10) event because she “felt it was too late for her to pull something together,” the singer took to Twitter to lend a fiery clap back.
“I’ve kept my mouth shut but now you’re lying about me,” she wrote on Twitter. “I can pull together a performance over night and you know that, Ken. It was when my creativity & self-expression was stifled by you that I decided not to attend. I hope the show is exactly what you want it to be and more.”
Going on to claim she did not “feel supported” and that the Grammy producer was “playing games,” her emotional response grabbed headlines to say the least. By the time the news hit the desk of Ehrlich, he took to press again to offer a response. Sitting down with our friends at Rolling Stone, he stated:
“I saw those tweets and what she said. I guess it was a surprise,” Erhlich tells Rolling Stone at rehearsals for the show this weekend. “I will say this, and they don’t want me to say it but I’m going to say it: The thing that probably bothered me more than whatever else she said about me is when she said I’m not collaborative.
“The fact of the matter is — and I actually wrote a little thing in the middle of the night that I’m not going to do anything about, but, I mean. You can ask Christina Aguilera, who I asked to do ‘It’s a Man’s World’ for James Brown,” Ehrlich added. “You can ask Melissa Etheridge, who finished her cancer treatment and I put her out on stage, bald, doing Janis Joplin. You can ask Ricky Martin who overnight became the creator of the Latin music revolution. Ask Mary J. Blige, who was scared shitless to go out there and do ‘No More Drama.’ I basically worked with her to mold it. Ask H.E.R. who’s in this show.”
Ehrlich says he never spoke to Grande directly, but worked with her management team, and that he usually does “not have this happen.” “I don’t know if I’m good at anything else, but I understand artists and I can hear other artists in an artist,” he says. “I don’t say to people, ‘This is what you should do.’ I approach it casually and say, hey, this might be a good idea, let’s find something in the middle.”