For a star who’s been publicly unlucky in love, Selena Gomez has a surprisingly rich catalog of love songs. There’s the title track of her 2015 album, Revival, whose subject basks in the romantic glow of self-discovery. Her biggest hit to date is a profession of tenderness for a woman rising from the ashes of heartbreak. You see what I’m getting at: Gomez has historically been the object of her own affection. And while so-called “empowerment pop” always runs the risk of corniness, the details of Gomez’s biography have made hers feel earned. Resilient in the face of vicious scrutiny of her relationships and health struggles, Gomez became both a credible mirror to her listeners’ pain and a beacon for their shot at redemption. While her peers spend their days furiously plotting performances of vulnerability, Gomez may be the most convincingly down-to-earth pop star we have.
All of that transformative, hard-won self-love has unlocked a new era for Gomez; these days, her love songs have a different object. I Said I Love You First is her seventh studio album and first full-length collaboration with Benny Blanco, to whom she is recently engaged. Blanco and Gomez’s professional relationship extends back at least a decade, to when he co-wrote and produced some of the more radio-oriented singles on Revival. He may lack his fiancée’s seismic celebrity, but Blanco’s fingerprints are all over modern-day pop: A former Dr. Luke protégé, he’s behind No. 1 hits by the likes of Katy Perry, Maroon 5, and Justin Bieber. Even so, such behind-the-scenes players rarely get co-billing with A-list singers. Here, the gesture clearly serves the album’s meta-narrative: Selena and Benny are in love, and their love is a meeting of musical minds. Mazel tov to the happy couple.
Absent this meta-narrative, I Said I Love You First is quite scattershot, an odd collection of songs that sound like other songs, incongruous spoken interludes, and one random reggaeton track (“I Can’t Get Enough”) first released in 2019. In interviews, Blanco and Gomez underscored the ease with which the album came together. They worked on it at home, in bed, they said; in light of the results, this has had the unfortunate effect of making me more sympathetic to return-to-office mandates. The record opens with Gomez speaking about growing up and embracing change, in a clip lifted from a farewell address to the cast of her Disney Channel show Wizards of Waverly Place, then launches into a lament for her youth. It ends with a twinkly little paean about the fragile nature of love. In between, the loosest outline of a narrative arc traces the fading of one relationship into another.
