Selena Gomez ‘Couldn’t Figure Out’ Her ‘Sound’ Until Benny Blanco Helped Produce Her New Album

Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco are truly a team. 

Gomez, 32, and Blanco, 37, sat down for a joint interview with Rolling Stone that was published on Monday, March 17, and promoted their collaboration on I Said I Love You First, Gomez’s first album in five years. 

Gomez said her fiancé, a producer and songwriter, significantly helped shape the musical direction of the album, which will be released on Friday, March 21. 

“I was, to be honest, very frustrated and kind of confused on where I wanted to go next musically,” Gomez told Rolling Stone. “And we had been together for a while, and obviously I would confide in him. I couldn’t figure out my sound. It helps that he knows a little bit about music, and it kind of happened organically to where I felt like this process was unlike any other process I’d ever been through.”

Blanco recalled that Gomez would “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. All the songwriting, it’s all our friends. There’s no, like, ‘Man, we’re gonna get in with this person for the first time — I wonder how this is gonna go.’ We also kept this one really close to the chest, because I feel like it was so important for it to be written exactly how we wanted it and to feel exactly how we wanted it to feel.”

I Said I Love You First contains a guest appearance from Gracie Abrams and chronicles the couple’s love story. Gomez got engaged to Blanco in December 2024 after more than one year of dating.

The singer and actress called “storytelling” her biggest strength in music and said she feels most “comfortable in a lower register and a softer tone.” She continued, “That’s something that I know I can bring to the table, so I just tried to highlight that. And so did Benny, while he was composing everything and putting it together. It was like, ‘What would be nice and soothing for my voice, nothing that sounded like I was trying to be anything else?’”

Meanwhile, Blanco praised Gomez, gushing, “She was never trying to be anybody else. She was, like, emo whisper-y before it was a thing. The one thing I love about her music, beyond obviously her voice and her tone and everything, is her point of view. No matter what type of song she’s doing, she’s speaking from the heart. She doesn’t give a f— what anyone else thinks. And you either like it or you don’t.”

The twosome were friends and musical collaborators before they began dating in 2023. 

“I was so sure that I was gonna marry her. I just knew,” Blanco told Rolling Stone. “It’s just a very different feeling. I know when Sel wakes up, she’s thinking in her head, ‘How can I make this day as good as I can for Benny?’ And I know I’m waking up and saying, ‘How can I make this day as good for Sel?’ We’re just thinking about each other.”

As for their future walk down the aisle, “I think every day she’s planned a new wedding in her head,” he revealed. “We’re very much ‘take it one day at a time’-type of people. We’re still not over this moment. Literally, while you were talking, she was sitting there staring at her ring.”