- Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco have unveiled their collaborative album, “I Said I Love You First.”
- The engaged couple spoke at length about their love and connection during their promotional tour.
- Lady Gaga also highlighted the contributions of her fiancé while promoting her new album “Mayhem.”
If Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco want you to take away one thing from their new album, it’s not that they can make a great song — it’s that they’re madly in love.
The couple unveiled “I Said I Love You First” on Friday, just over three months after Gomez announced their engagement. The 14-track collaborative album isn’t especially profound; it’s mostly comprised of nondescript pop arrangements that evoke better songs from Gomez’s past, like “Good for You” and “Fetish,” or better albums by other artists, like The Marías’ “Submarine” and Charli XCX’s “Brat.”
But it seems that for Gomez and Blanco, the fact that they made the album together at all is just as important as how it sounds, if not more so.
“She’d wake up, I’d have a pen out, and I’d write what was on her mind. Then we’d go into the other room and create it, and it became a song. It was such a cathartic and therapeutic experience,” Blanco told Rolling Stone.
Indeed, the rollout has been predominantly devoted to celebrating the couple’s domestic bliss, their positive experience working as collaborators, and their respect for each other’s talents. The album mostly functions as a souvenir of their journey thus far.
What Gomez and Blanco are doing isn’t exactly new; musicians have collaborated with their romantic partners throughout history, especially when their partners are fellow musicians. However, the public-facing emphasis on their real-life romantic connection, rather than letting their creative synergy speak for itself, does belong to an emerging trend among pop stars — a pronounced streak of pride in their thriving love lives.
As Business Insider’s Julia Pugachevsky reported last year, the rom-com economy is booming and the music industry is not immune. Although Taylor Swift has a reputation for translating heartbreak into irresistible pop songs and fiercely protecting her love life from prying eyes, as she did with Joe Alwyn, fans noticed a change in her tune when she began dating NFL star Travis Kelce.
Swift seemed determined to own her new romance in the open air, much to the delight of onlookers. She even edited her Eras Tour set list to include “So High School,” a giddy standout from her latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” whose lyrics unabashedly point to Kelce (“You know how to ball / I know Aristotle”).
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More recently, Gomez and Blanco’s album was preceded by Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem,” which she created with the help of her fiancé, Michael Polansky.
Despite his lack of musical training, Polansky is listed as an executive producer on “Mayhem” alongside Gaga and Andrew Watt. He is also credited as a cowriter on seven out of the album’s 14 standard tracks.
Although neither “I Said I Love You First” nor “Mayhem” is singularly focused on the singer’s current relationship — Gomez reminisces about her first date with Blanco on “Sunset Blvd,” and Gaga waxes poetic about her engagement to Polansky on “Blade of Grass,” but in both cases these lovey-dovey songs are more outliers than tone-setters — both women dedicated large portions of their promotional tours to highlighting the contributions of their partners.
In Gomez’s case, this is baked into the very structure of the album. Blanco is credited as a co-performer on every song, not just as the project’s lead producer. Gomez and Blanco also shared promotional duties, conducting interviews as a team, taking on the “wings of death” together on “Hot Ones,” and costarring in music videos. They both appear on the album cover. The album has been explicitly marketed as a product of their relationship; in other words, it wouldn’t exist if they weren’t in love.
Though Polansky’s contributions are less conspicuous, the same can safely be said for “Mayhem.” Gaga proudly credits her fiancé with convincing her to return to her musical roots: “He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music,'” she told Vogue last year.
Gaga has continued to celebrate Polansky’s role in the creative process while promoting the album, telling The New York Times, “Michael was in the studio every day with me. He oversaw the whole process of making the record, completing it, helping me to shape the sound of the record creatively.”
Both Gomez and Gaga have opened up about their traumatic experiences with men — emotional abuse and sexual violence, respectively — which makes their in-love eras all the more satisfying. Selenators and Little Monsters alike are thrilled to see their idols in fulfilling, long-term relationships, which the artists surely hope will translate to streams and sales. (“Mayhem” already debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.)
However, this trend also has an added bonus: proving that artists don’t need to be miserable to be productive.
“It makes me so happy that my fans see that I’m really happy,” Gaga told Entertainment Weekly, “because I know that I’m not a role model for everyone, but I hope that I can maybe be an example that you can be a deeply artistic person and that we don’t have to romanticize torture.”
