Love is in the air for the release of Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco‘s joint album, “I Said I Love You First.” The couple debuted the 14-song project on Thursday night, along with a music video for the piano ballad, “Younger and Hotter Than Me.”
The video starts with a melancholic Gomez laying on the couch of a home covered in linens. Gomez leaves the living room with a bag of toiletries, only to reveal the home is actually a set in a soundstage. She encounters a young girl in a princess costume in the building’s bathroom as she sings, “I hate what I wore / But I hate myself more / For thinking you were different / Wish I never loved you / We’re not getting any younger / But your girlfriends seem to.”
Blanco also makes an appearance in the visualizer, greeting Gomez and having lunch with her until he has to leave, and she retreats back to the set.
Ahead of the album, Spotify released footage of a one-on-one conversation between the couple as a teaser. The 33-minute video revealed the couple’s writing process — “We’d get up in the morning and have a conversation. But our conversation was never led going, ‘What are we going to write in the album?’” Selena said.
Blanco also said he felt like Gomez’s “personal journal” throughout the making of the album. “I was constantly just writing whatever you said wherever we were,” Blanco said. “Sometimes, you’d be saying something really important, and I didn’t know if you even realized, but I would always open my phone and be like, ‘Fuck, that’s such a good line for a song.’”
In this interview, the pair also confirmed Finneas and Charli xcx worked on the album. The LP also includes a collaboration with Gracie Abrams, and “I Can’t Get Enough,” which features J Balvin and Tainy was released in 2019.
“More so than anything else, this isn’t an album where I had any expectation because it’s something we got to do together for us,” Blanco told Spotify. “As a byproduct of who we both are, other people get to listen to this album… All in all, the best part about it was being able to spend time and make something that I love with the person I love.”
