Selena Gomez might not be your favorite pop star’s favorite pop star, but she’s probably got a track or two on their favorite playlist. She began her career as an actress on Disney’s Wizards Of Waverly Place, but despite sustaining a decades-long musical career with many Top 10 hits, she’s never quite escaped her former-Disney-kid image. She is quietly a billionaire, largely because of non-musical ventures such as her Rare Beauty makeup line and various luxury endorsements. She continues to be an actress, on notably outre projects, like the Oscar-nominated (albeit rapidly self-discrediting) film Emilia Pérez, and the Emmy-nominated true-crime series Only Murders In The Building with Steve Martin and Martin Short. This goes back to 2013, where Gomez damned her Disney past by starring in A24 and Harmony Korine’s sleazefest Spring Breakers (though she hedged her rep a little by having her character dip out before the real debauchery begins). But there, too, her past precedes her; last year Gomez told The Hollywood Reporter that she frequently sends casting directors anonymous tapes or has her agents withhold her name until she showed up to the audition, so they wouldn’t automatically reject her as Disney fluff.
Soon, Gomez plans to add yet another role to her multihyphenate identity: newlywed. She recently got engaged to veteran pop producer and very veteran jokester Benny Blanco, and to celebrate the engagement, the two artists have released a collaborative album, I Said I Love You First. The title is a true statement, as the couple revealed in an Interview Magazine piece; Gomez indeed said “I love you” first. And throughout the album’s accompanying press junket, they’ve shared even more about their happy soon-to-be-wedded life: cooking elaborate meals together, falling asleep to TV reruns, and whiling away the days snuggling. Relatable, if you can forget the billionaire thing.
Blanco is somewhat less than a celebrity, so here’s a brief introduction. He started his career as a MySpace-era rapper – “I feel like that’s how every white person starts out,” he told Eclipse Magazine in 2008. Like many a producer from rock’s golden era, he paid his dues by making porn music – specifically, beats for a softcore series called Hip-Hop Honeys by The Source’s Jonathan Schecter. (In Eclipse, again: “I was so horny, I was like ‘yeah!”) He joined rapper Spank Rock to make Bangers & Cash, a Miami bass homage with Fruity Loops type beats and 2 Live Crew filth; surprisingly, it holds up. Then he was taken on by newly massive megaproducer Dr. Luke as a protege, and alongside mogul Max Martin and prolific songwriter Bonnie McKee, he cowrote some of the biggest hits of the early 2010s, including Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream and Kesha’s Animal. (Blanco has since distanced himself from Dr. Luke, after Kesha accused him of sexual assault: “I don’t have any relationship to him anymore,” he told NPR in 2018.)
I am on record as a Benny Blanco hater, but I’d actually like to issue a bit of an apology. In an oft-quoted excerpt from John Seabrook’s The Song Machine, McKee shares an anecdote portraying Blanco as the team’s lowest-common-denominator for hire: “Luke always makes us ‘Benny-proof’ everything. He says that if Benny doesn’t get it, America won’t get it.” But that’s an account by Dr. Luke, who is not known for being the nicest guy. By all accounts, Blanco was substantially involved in the actual musical productions by the Martin/Luke team; much as McKee doesn’t get much credit for her toplining work, Blanco doesn’t get enough credit for that.
And Blanco has evolved with the times. Like most of his producer cohort – including Dr. Luke – he’s had to diversify, from having his own signature sound to being able to recreate the signature sound of anyone. He now contains multitudes; he still makes joke trap music like Lil Dicky’s “My Dick Sucks,” but he can also do silken soundscapes, as on Kali Uchis’s “Moonlight,” or reverbed alt-R&B gloom, as on SZA’s “What Do I Do.” Gomez, too, has evolved as a vocalist. Her early hits, like “Love You Like A Love Song” and “Come And Get It,” gave her voice mecha-sized production so it could sound as big as the maximalist tracks it inhabited. But since 2015’s Revival – her first album with Blanco – she no longer disguises her small voice but embraces it. Sometimes, as on career-best “Bad Liar,” her voice sounds conversational. Sometimes, as on A$AP Rocky collaboration “Good For You,” she has an almost aching tone; as Blanco astutely noted in the Interview Magazine piece, she can make even the most confident lyrics sound wistful and wounded.
I Said I Love You First is the product of that evolution. Their collaborators are largely the same people that Gomez has worked with since Revival and that Blanco just had on his album Friends Keep Secrets 2: chameleonic producer Cashmere Cat, gloriously dorky songwriter Julia Michaels, singer-slash-ascended Swiftie Gracie Abrams, and producer-slash-brother-of-Billie-Eilish Finneas O’Connell. Gomez often sounds like a diffuse version of her cowriters – her vocal stylings owe a lot to Michaels – and she sounds especially so here; Blanco said something else astute in that Interview Magazine piece, but not in the way he thought it was: “Nobody’s ever going to hear a song of hers and be like, ‘Oh, I wonder if that’s Selena Gomez.’”
Here, the wondering goes in the opposite direction; you instantly know which artist most of these songs are going for. Charli XCX and Dylan Brady of 100 gecs give Gomez “Bluest Flame,” probably a Brat offcut; Gomez sounds like its demo vocal. I have no idea why “Don’t Wanna Cry” wasn’t a single, as it’s a pristine example of the disco sophistipop that the Weeknd and others have spent 10+ years perfecting. Gomez inhabits the tracks with crystalline anonymity – perhaps too much, as the noticeably extensive vocal production kind of sounds like an AI upscaling. On “Ojos Tristes,” another standout, Selena is shrouded behind two layers of influence. The dreampop sound comes from suddenly buzzy band the Marías, who do most of the vocals, and the lilting melody is interpolated from “El Muchacho de los Ojos Tristes,” a 1981 single and beloved cult hit by Spanish folk-pop artist Jeanette – kind of like the Latin-indie equivalent of Margo Guryan. A couple artists aren’t present on the album but very much present in pastiche, like folk-rock era Taylor Swift and – especially – Lana Del Rey. (The Lana pastiches sound oddly like the ones on Camila Cabello’s C,XOXO, minus the forced edginess.)
That being said, Gomez has a longstanding history with pretty much everyone here. Blanco bragged about Gomez to Rolling Stone – he’s been doing a lot of bragging this album cycle – that she was a huge, undersung influence on the pop music of the 2020s, and he wasn’t just being a wife guy. Selena Gomez has known Taylor Swift since the days when people were still talking about the Squad. “Bluest Flame” isn’t the first time Selena’s sound has blurred into Charli’s: “Same Old Love” was to Sucker what “Bluest Flame” is to Brat. And even Lana’s breakout hit “Video Games” was produced by a Blanco protege, Daniel Omelio. Gomez and Blanco were indeed there from the start, and so much of I Said I Love You First has the feel of coming full circle.
The one thing I Said I Love You First doesn’t have are love songs. There are sex songs, sure. Some are fairly tasteful. “Cowboy” has no yeehaw but the sleek poise of someone who wears makeup to bed; Gomez coos that “You want me to act like the bad girls,” then an uncredited GloRilla hijacks the track to demonstrate what an actual baddie sounds like. Others have the distinctive vibe of that viral horny press release by comedian-turned-tinned-fish-upseller Caroline Goldfarb for Meghan Trainor’s own newlywed album The Love Train. “Sunset Blvd” weds a pretty chorus about public sex (“Making you famous, everyone’s watching”) to a prechorus about how much she wants his big! Big!!!! Hard!!! Heart! Obviously this doesn’t work, but not because of the innuendo – no sex joke slander shall be entertained here – but because a “hard heart” is neither a compliment nor something particularly associated with Benny Blanco. And the song’s structure is so rigid and repetitive that the prechorus just looms.
As for love, though, not only does Gomez sing about multiple relationships here rather than the one from the promo, but she particularly dwells on breakups, insecurities about exes, and ambiguous enmeshments. She even frontloads these. “Younger And Hotter Than Me,” a close-miked cross between Swift and the Moldy Peaches (a stated influence), is half vulnerable confession and half a stealth diss at a guy whose dating history follows the Leonardo DiCaprio age-gap graph. Next is the chipper “Call Me When You Break Up,” a song about missing a friend told through the language of an emotional affair. (It’s also got the album’s best joke: When her crush does actually call, she backpedals the whole song to tell them that she totally wants to be there for their wedding, because she’s always there for him in a completely un-sus way.) Sometimes Gomez inhabits two sides of the same heartbreak: She watches her ex kiss someone else in front of her on “Don’t Wanna Cry,” then revels in doing that revenge kissing on “How Does It Feel To Be Forgotten.”
What’s the point of a big relationship album without the relationship? For Blanco, it’s obvious: He clearly wants to escape his old fratty image, exemplified in a now-buried Reddit AMA where he introduces himself as “a record producer, songwriter, and masturbator,” shares that he “just ate babaganush… have lots of gas!!!” and shares studio anecdotes about GHB, horse cocks, and slapping ass cheeks for a snare drum sound. Gomez’s motivations are more opaque. (There’s a reason most of the quotes in this column are from Benny Blanco.) I Said I Love You First kind of feels like she’s getting her songs out the door so she can move on. The album even exhumes her reggaeton single “I Can’t Get Enough” from the 2010s, finally getting it released.
This isn’t just speculation on my part, though; Gomez has been insinuating for a while that she’d like to retire from music, and ramped it up last year during the Emilia Pérez press cycle, telling the SmartLess podcast: “I feel like I have one more album in me.” The bio on her Instagram – one of the most popular accounts on the site – introduces her as the founder of Rare Beauty and the “founder/CIO” of “mental fitness ecosystem” Wondermind; while her album gets a cursory mention, she doesn’t identify herself as a singer. If you wanted to be cynical, you might point out that music contributed very little to her billion-dollar net worth compared to her other ventures. You could point to her peers’ similar pivots; artists have long had extramusical ventures like fashion lines or perfumes (Gomez has two), but lately they’re becoming less like dilettantish side gigs and more like their primary careers. Dua Lipa seems to want to found a Goop-esque lifestyle media empire. Rihanna has abandoned music entirely, maybe permanently, to focus on her Fenty Beauty juggernaut.
There’s a less cynical reason, though. I Said I Love You First implicitly promises a glimpse into Gomez’s personal life – down to the cover art, a faux-voyeuristic glimpse through a keyhole of Gomez and Blanco in bed – but Gomez simultaneously seems wary that someone might actually do that. In an ominous recombination of two industry trends – the spate of stream-chasingly “deluxe” album editions and the Genius-fueled demand for lyrics explainers – the album was released alongside a commentary track, I Said I Love You First – Explained, in which Selena Gomez explains almost nothing. Here’s the story behind “How Does It Feel to Be Forgotten”: “A lot of people like to dissect my music, and I can tell you that this specific song [is] much more about what we’ve experienced. It’s not my past, it’s more just – it’s just an honest song and I think that’s all I wanted it to be.”
If Gomez sounds defensive here, it’s because she dated Justin Bieber at the peak of his fame, which subjected her to a level of tabloid scrutiny and gossip notoriety she clearly didn’t like. Like every pop artist, she’s also all too familiar with the parasocial prying that comes with being famous these days. In that Hollywood Reporter interview, she said something telling about where her mind is: “It’s really scary to talk about music that maybe has been a part of your story and isn’t anymore…. But every interview I’ve done for [Emilia Pérez], there’s not been one personal question asked, and I’ve wanted to kiss every single reporter in the mouth and just say, thank you.” And when asked what the acting world gave her that the music world did not, she answered in one word: “Sanity.”
It’s hard to fault her here. Gomez has been open about how much superstar fame has affected her mental health. In a way, she’s now living the dream: being successful without being famous. Perhaps she’ll find she’s got another album in her still; perhaps she’ll leave the music world behind, content to have shaped its sound. But we’ll always have “Bad Liar.”
