Selena Gomez sat down with Apple Beats 1’s Zane Lowe to discuss her new album Rare, which arrived on Friday. With her co-writers Justin Tranter and Julia Michaels, she dove into the album’s inspirations and the process of writing it down to the very last day of production.
“We were still, the last day, writing music…[like] the song I personally think is going to be one of our biggest as well,” she said. She didn’t specify which song that might be, but implied that it might be the next single after “Lose You to Love Me” and “Look at Her Now.”
Gomez also shared that the hook from “People You Know” (“People go from people you know to people you don’t”) came from a friend of a friend, and Julia Michaels also went into her own inspiration for writing “Lose You to Love Me.”
“‘Lose You to Love Me’ happened when I had come home from tour,” she recalled. “It was on Valentine’s Day that we wrote it. And I think that’s probably one of my favorites. And it was also our first time seeing [Selena] in so long. I think it was just one of my favorites just because we were all reunited again and doing it again.”
Gomez revealed that she had just gotten back from a mental health treatment center when they wrote the song. “When I walked in, it was literally just the piano and the chorus and a bit of the first verse and I just sat there. And I tell people this, too, because it was also such a very raw moment. A, I had just gotten back, but B, we were in the bright daylight, and that’s not normally how you’re maybe talking about something like that.”
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When Lowe asked Gomez about her Disney Channel roots and breaking out of them, in part, through her role in 2013’s Spring Breakers, Gomez stated that she had “the utmost respect for” Disney for giving her the opportunity for stardom. “But when you’re coming from a machine like that, you end up losing a bit of that vulnerability because you are meant to carry something that is carrying that brand and making sure that you are being a respectful person that families are OK with and that kids can look up to. And so I had dealt with that for so long that I had been conditioned.”
She went on, “When I chose to do Spring Breakers, that was a huge moment. It’s very controversial, but it slowly happened where I didn’t want to have to be OK; I needed to say something because it got to a point where everyone else was saying something, and that would drive me crazy.”