Selena Gomez Wasn’t Sure She Was Ready To Tell This Story
She’s wrestled with bipolar disorder, life-threatening illness, and tabloid hell. Now, she’s opening up about all of it in incredible ways
by Alex Morris for Rolling Stone
Photographs by Amanda Charchian for Rolling Stone
Selena Gomez has a lot of baggage. She says this is true both “literally and figuratively,” and she says it while I am rolling my own literal baggage across the threshold of her Los Angeles home, having first rolled it past the security gate, then up the verdant hill, then along the glimmering pool, before depositing it in a sort of glam room with a flowery rug and a view of the patio through open glass doors. By this point, I may be perspiring a bit. Gomez hugs me anyway, then scurries off down a hallway to confer with a young woman about the air conditioning. When she returns, she plops into a white leather salon-style chair and launches into a tale of how, just prior to my arrival, she’d been eating an acai bowl only to realize that “my entire face was purple.” The general vibe here is clear: We are human. We perspire. We get food stuck to our faces. We have baggage. Welcome.
For a while now, one could say this has been a signature of Gomez’s appeal, this sort of wide-armed embrace of the human condition. Her recent albums span an emotional register that begins at “personal” and ends somewhere around “crushingly confessional,” songs she says arrived via some alchemy of emotional messiness, Chinese takeout, and serious dishing. “One day I walked in, and the producers were like, ‘How are you?’ And I was like, ‘I want a boyfriend.’ They were like, ‘Oh, should we write about that?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And that’s the whole song: I want a boyfriend,” she says of “Boyfriend,” a standout on 2020’s all-around excellent Rare, an album that continues a years-long streak of dealing with her feelings amid irresistible pop hooks.
