Selena Gomez is the enormously successful Disney child star who grew up to be a Hollywood actor and global pop sensation. As notably, she’s the third most followed person on Instagram, the most popular woman, with 421 million followers. Benny Blanco is the golden boy American producer-songwriter whose many, many hits run the gamut from Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” to Ed Sheeran’s “Happier” to Kesha’s “Tik Tok”. The pair got engaged last December.
This, then, is a monster album. It’s also better than its icky title and tacky celeb status suggest. I admit I came to I Said I Love You First wanting to slate it. The chirpy taster single “Call Me When You Break Up”, featuring beige Taylor Swift-lite singer Gracie Adams, is bouncily smug and annoying. The opening minute of the album doesn’t help its cause, featuring 44 seconds of a sobbing Gomez, in full Oscars speech-style emoting mode, thanking a bunch of people for being her surrogate family as she grew up away from home (“You have raised me in so many different ways and challenged me as a person”, etc). So far, so meh.
But, but, but, listen to this 14-track album end-to-end, and it comes across as both sweetly forthright and craftedly poppy, all in a very Los Angeles way. It’s a concept piece that holds together; an autofictional window into Gomez’s heart. It begins with her in thrall to a dodgy man, moves into happy love and sex (with Blanco, we must presume), reflects thoughtfully on a rival girlfriend now left out in the cold, and concludes with a forthright declaration of love. Coming in at 35 minutes, it also doesn't outstay its welcome.
The music is smooth sad-girl yacht pop, somewhere between Kaki Uchis and Lana del Rey (both of whom Blanco has worked with). It runs the gamut from the soft piano ballad “Younger and Hotter Than Me”, about the aforementioned dodgy ex, with his predilection for juvenile flesh, to sunny reggaeton flavours (“I Can’t Get Enough”, featuring kingpins of the genre J Balvin and Tainy), to the gorgeous easy listening of “Ojos Tristes”, to the panting lust-fuelled EDM 4/4 of “Bluest Flame”, to acoustic slowies such as the closing “Scared of Loving You”
Gomez has a chatty, direct way with lyrics too. She’s a believable raconteur. “Don’t Take It Personally”, for instance, begins, “I know the two of you used to talk, like, every day/And ever since I came around it hasn’t been that way/You’ve probably got a dartboard with my face right in the middle”. She has said that she considers herself an actress these days, with her music winding down, an occasional outlet that will soon stop altogether. This rings true. Crucially, I Said I Love You First does not sound forced; it's smoothly catchy but has feeling. An unexpected success.
Below: watch the video for "Younger and Hotter Than Me" by Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco
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