With her monster-hit album, Ariana Grande has everyone — as in Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, and Rihanna — lining up to rave about her powerhouse voice. She has fans so crazy that the police got involved and a roller-coaster love life burning up Twitter. The pop princess opens up about everything ...

It's six days before the American Music Awards, and Ariana Grande has no idea what she's going to do. "It's been quite the fiasco," says the 20-year-old pop singer. For what will surely be the most high-profile performance of her young life thus far, Grande has picked out the dress she'll wear ... and that's about it. "They're working out the choreography, and I don't even know what song I'm singing yet," she says with a sigh. "I've been running around like crazy."

Welcome to the wild world of Ariana Grande. One of the hottest up-and-comers in music right now, thanks to the smash-hit success of her debut album, Yours Truly, Grande's been sent around the globe in order to promote it, zipping through Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, and Japan in a matter of weeks.

In Amsterdam, Grande was mobbed by fans when she tried to make her way through the airport. "I never want to be the person who avoids my own fans, so I always try to stop and say hi," she says. "But it turned into a big mosh of people, and it became quite dangerous. I got sent to the police station, and they told me not to come back to that airport!" Later, so many fans camped out to see the singer that the manager of her hotel dubbed Grande a safety risk and forbade her from going out on her balcony to wave to them. "I just went out anyway," she says. "I said, 'You can't stop me!' That's one thing to get in trouble for: loving your fans too much."

Despite being literally surrounded by people, she confesses to a little loneliness. "I didn't know that I was capable of going to so many places in so few days," she says. "It's really hard for me and my friend Alexa, because she's in school and she doesn't have the flexibility to come visit me on the road whenever she wants. But whenever she's on break, I try to fly her in and keep her with me as long as I can. It's funny; one time I tweeted her school in Gainesville, like, 'I'm keeping Alexa!' And they tweeted me back: 'All right. Make sure she does her homework.'"

Now Grande's in Los Angeles, calling me up in between rehearsals for the song she hasn't figured out yet. She's charming and funny but clearly a little tired, so I let her go and wish her luck. "Thanks," she bleats with a sort of desperate edge, as though she'll need all the support she can get to make it to Sunday.

A few days later, Grande appears onstage at the American Music Awards, poured into a slinky red Jessica Rabbit dress. She stands stock-still under a spotlight, singing an a cappella version of "The Way" before moving into an earnest rendition of "Tattooed Heart." There's no choreography, no pyrotechnics ... just Ariana Grande standing there and singing.

She gets a standing ovation.

Just don't expect her to go poppin' bottlesto celebrate. "I think I'm an old soul," she says. "What excites younger people doesn't excite me." It's an unlikely package: The tiny pop princess with the soul of a retirement-home-dwelling doo-wop devotee, the octave-spanning pipes of Mariah Carey, and the wholesome image of a Nickelodeon child star ... which, to put a fine point on it, she kind of still is.

When I first met Grande two months before the AMAs, we were at a restaurant down the block from where she shoots her TV series Sam & Cat. But it was already clear then — and is even more so now — that she is destined for bigger things than Nickelodeon can offer. Her focus these days is on her turbo-charged pop career. "Music is everything that I've ever wanted to do," she says, her long-lashed brown eyes open wide. "To put so much time and effort into something that you feel so passionate about and that you adore so much and that you live for, and to see it be recognized and pay off, is just the best thing in the world."

And it did take time. Raised in Florida, Grande set off for Broadway in her early teens, and after scoring a role in the musical 13, the fledgling singer-actress went West, where she was cast as daffy scene-stealer Cat on the Nickelodeon sitcom Victorious and again on her current show, a spin-off. After toiling onset during the day, she headed into the studio at night. She spent more than three years working on the luscious jams that would become Yours Truly, cowriting half its 12 songs.

Grande seems almost unable to believe that her long-in-the-works album is even out, let alone that it's made her a superstar. "I'm kind of a boring, normal girl who likes Harry Potter and to sit in her pajamas and sing. A lot of my friends are partiers, but I've never really clicked with that."

Grande is hardly uptight — she's sitting opposite me in a denim crop top and barely-there shorts — but by way of comparison, she offers, "I like Barbra Streisand, and when was the last time you saw Babs getting, like, turnt up? That's kind of the road that I, as a lady, would like to go down."

Although Grande considers herself the furthest thing from a headline-chasing diva, her romantic life has given the gossip sites plenty to talk about. On her wrist, nestled next to a red kabbalah bracelet, a string of letters spells out Nathan, a nod to 19-year-old Nathan Sykes, the youngest member of British boy band The Wanted. The two recorded the duet "Almost Is Never Enough," but Grande kept their dating under wraps until they went public last fall in a manner more Nickelodeon than MTV: Fans spotted them holding hands at Disneyland.

Grande, who calls herself a hopeless romantic, was won over by their first date: "We were going back to his hotel to watch a movie, and he had Ladurée macarons and sunflowers waiting — I love Parisian baked goods, and sunflowers are my favorite flower," she says. "He had taken the DVD player out of the bedroom and into the living room, because he said he didn't want to take me into the bedroom on the first date."

Still, when your life moves as fast as Grande's does right now, nothing's guaranteed (except that whatever happens will be fodder for another hit song). Maybe that's one reason she remains wary of going too public with her relationships. "Sometimes people get too fixated on what people are going to say," she says, recalling the grief she got when she Instagrammed a friendly kiss from former tourmate Justin Bieber. "At the end of the day, you're in a relationship because you love that person, not because of what other people think."

How does she deal with her Twitter haters then? "Oh, they're evil as hell!" she chuckles. "I don't even block them anymore, because I feel like it's giving them negativity in return. So I just let it happen and forgive them and move on. Those people are fighting their own battles." When all else fails, she thinks back to some advice her grandmother gave her. "I said, 'Nonna, how do you deal with the jealous ladies at the home where you live?' And she said, 'I don't blame them. I'd be jealous too.'"

When asked about other guys she's dated, Grande grows introspective. "In the past, I was in some relationships that actually took a toll on me mentally and made me feel like a different person in a bad way," she says. She admits the sad, nostalgic "Honeymoon Avenue" was written about "a very confused relationship that I stayed in for all the wrong reasons. I was so incredibly sad while I was with this person. I'm a happy girl — I love laughing. But I don't remember smiling once when I was with him." Now, she says, she wants a relationship "that makes me feel like a better version of me."

If Yours Truly is the emotional story of Grande growing up — "A lot can happen when you're 17 to 20," she notes — expect her next record to chronicle a woman coming into her own. "When you go through those teenage years, there's lots of crying and drama and craziness and doubting yourself, and I haven't felt any of that in a long time," she says. "I've just felt calm and happy, like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I feel like I'm becoming the lady who I want to become and who my mom wants me to be."

Not that she takes any of her newfound success for granted. "I never really expected to be taken seriously as an artist, and it's just been the ultimate, proudest achievement," she says. "I've dealt with a lot of people not knowing what to expect from me because of my age and my personality. People often mistake my kindness for weakness, and they didn't expect much from me, because at the end of the day, I'm just a nice Italian girl from Boca."

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Photo credit: Matt Jones

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