Song Exploder - Selena Gomez - Lose You to Love Me

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Selena Gomez is a singer, songwriter, and actress, who’s spent most of her life in the public eye. She started her acting career as a child, and put out her first albums as a teenager. She���s had three number one albums and eight Top 10 hits, and in 2017, Billboard named her Woman of the Year. At one point, she was the most followed person on Instagram, and the details of her life are constantly discussed in tabloid headlines. So, when your private life is that public, how do you write a song about something as personal as heartbreak? Selena teamed up with the Grammy-winning production duo Mattman & Robin, who she’d worked with before. And she turned to her longtime songwriting collaborators, Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter. Julia Michaels is also a Grammy-nominated artist in her own right, and Justin Tranter, also a Grammy nominee, was named BMI’s 2017 Pop Songwriter of the Year. The three of them have written 10 songs together, including this one, “Lose You to Love Me.” The song came out in October 2019, and went on to become Selena’s first number-one hit. It went double-platinum in the US, and was named one of the best songs of the year by Vulture and Billboard. In this episode, Selena, Julia and Justin break down how the song came to be, from the first writing session to the final production touches from Finneas. songexploder.net/selena-gomez

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Selina Gomez is a singer, songwriter, and actress, who spent most of her life in the public eye. She started her acting career as a child and put out her first albums as a teenager. She's had three number one albums, eight top ten hits, and in 2017, Billboard named her Woman of the Year. At one point, she was the most followed person on Instagram, and the details of her life, are constantly discussed in tabloid headlines. So when your private life is that public,

how do you write a song about something as personal as heartbreak? Do I think my story intrigues people in a different way? Obviously, it does. It's unfortunately how it works. But this song alone represents what a lot of people who are heartbroken have gone through. For the song, Lose You to Love Me, Selena teamed up with the Grammy-winning production duo Matt Men and Robin, whom she'd worked with before. And she turned to her longtime songwriting collaborators, Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter.

Julia Michaels is a Grammy-nominated artist in her own right, and Justin Tranter is also a Grammy nominee who is named BMI's Pop Songwriter of the Year. Selena, Julia, and Justin have written ten songs together, including Lose You to Love Me. The song came out in October 2019 and went on to become Selena's first. number one hit. It went double platinum in the US and was named one of the best songs of the year by Vulture and Billboard. In this episode, Selena Gomez tells the story of how Luzi to Love Me was made. I also spoke to Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter. Selena explains why she worked with them for this song. And the thick of healing. I'm Selena Gomez.

I work with tons of writers that are respect and love so much. But when it comes to working on something that's super personal, they were the ones that I went to. How do you know if you trust someone, you trust him? And I think that's what I felt with Justin and Julia. And I think how that happened so naturally with them is they didn't really want anything from me. They were genuinely people that came in and wanted to know my story.

My name is Julia Michaels. My name is Justin Tranter. Like a good 90% of the songs that I write are with Justin. But there's something so special about me, Julie, and Selena, together. In the beginning, I kind of would take one brick down, another brick down, and slowly, but surely it was all of us sharing, you know, our lives, I want to say it had been almost like a year and a half or so since I had seen Selena. I was on tour, like, pretty aggressively.

And she was working on her album. I was working with Matman and Robin, and I actually have worked with them millions of times. And they're kind of like a Justin Julia to me. We have like a good power team going on when we all work together. I was like, yeah, I'm coming home. I'll be home for like four days and then I have to get back on the road. So I think it was the last day that I was home. I texted her because we were going into the studio a little bit early

just to see if we could maybe finesse some sort of idea or finagle something. I had texted her like, hey, where's your mind out right now? What do you want us to focus on? And I was like, honestly, I'm exhausted, but I just want to tell the truth. You know, I just, I want to let go of this feeling that I had. When Julia came in and was talking about what her and Selena had discussed, it was really wanting to address, like, head on what Selena had been through, the heartbreak, the emotional roller coaster,

but really portray that she is on the other side of it. And I said to Justin, I was like, I feel like we should do a ballad. So Robin started playing some chords on the piano. Me and Julia just started to go and get, ideas started and melody started and sections started for her. What I remember going in, it was like I just saw the four people I was working on the song with, and they were just like, how you doing? I said I honestly don't know, kind of felt defeated, and sat down, and they just played me the chords.

And Julia then started humming, and it was just like, it brought tears to my eyes. She just started crying She was like This is so beautiful This is like exactly what I wanted All of a sudden it was just the maladies And it all just came out naturally You promised the world

And I fell for it I put you first And you adored it Sir Fires to my forest And you let it burn Sing off key in my chorus Because it wasn't yours We then just

dove into every single lyric and every single little thing that we could, tweaking lyrics from the first verse and chorus with us, making sure it fit her story perfectly. We'd always go into it that was killing. That's word for word, what I felt. It's like, I needed to lose you in order to feel like myself again. I needed to know what this kind of loss and this kind of pain was to really accept myself. reflect on myself in order to grow and learn.

We gave her a big hug, and it was just like a nice little, like, reuniting because none of us had seen each other in a while, so it was really nice. And then she was like, okay, I have this idea for the second verse. Pretty much syllable for syllable of the second verse is all, Selena. I gave my all and they all know it. You turn me down and I was showing, and two moons, I was like it was easy, made me think I deserved it, in the thick of healing. I was like, this song is coming out.

Are you sure you're willing to go there, to be this honest about your journey? She was like, of course we're going there. Are we trying to tell the story? Are we trying to let people heal through my healing? Then we have to go there. One of her superpowers is being so honest and she's going to give you her life in the lyric, But then when she gets in the mic, she does the same thing. She tells you the story.

She brings you through her truth. And that is what makes great art. You have to have an artist who is willing to expose their truth. I view acting and singing completely different. For me, when I'm on a set, I feel like I get to transform into someone else's life. And I get to experience something different. I find it sometimes easier for me to get out emotions. when I'm doing a scene or working with someone or a director that pulls that out of me.

But when I start getting in the studio, I start getting really weird because I know that it's all about me. And that's really hard. You know, that's me even processing things in my life that I haven't processed yet or that I'm currently walking through. And it's about me. You know, it's like every part of it. And that's, you know, sometimes scary.

To love, love, yeah, to love for you to love me. Yeah. To love, love, yeah. To love, love you. I needed to lose you to love me. So we all went into the studio, the recording booth, and Justin Julia, myself, just started chanting to love, to love me. And it was so fun, I got to create it with, you know, these people that, you know,

We're almost celebrating with me, and those are the moments you can let loose in the studio. The chanting is such an important part of the song, and it's the part where it's like the cliche, open your arms wide and just like scream and let all of it out. And then Matt Man and Robin, with all their magic, somehow made it sound like there was, you know, a thousand of us. I thought that was just so beautiful. I remember doing the, To Love, Love, yeah. It was really emotional. Really beautiful and just like a moment that, you know,

you never know what's going to be a hit, but you know when something's special. So after we laid down the demo, you know, we have to go back into the studio to then work on, you know, getting it just perfectly, like, done and kind of tweak things here and there, but we kept the song pretty bare. The string parts of the song just kill me.

That sort of bass pluck, high pluck, bass pluck, high pluck. When I hear it instantly now, it takes me to that place. And it almost makes it feel to me like a ballerina. And then we got this really cool idea that Phineas would maybe take it to the whole other level, like we know that he does so well. Phineas O'Connell, aka Phineas, is an artist and producer. He won the 2020 Grammy for a producer of the year for his work on his sister,

Billy Eilish's album. His extra touches and that kind of wendy feeling, it just added a texture to the song. You know, I'm like, how do you even come up with that? It was weird, and that's what made it cool. It was supposed to be released around fall, a new season, new harvest, if you will.

And he made it feel that way. I definitely wouldn't say that I was fully healed when we worked on the song, and there were a few times when I would go into the studio and I would take a few passes at it, and I wouldn't be able to get through it. So it became almost like another version of therapy, which, you know, that's so important to me at this point.

One of the hardest things for me to sing in the song was the bridge. It's the ending of the song, and that's the part where it's like, You know, I guess this is goodbye for us. You know, and that killed me. You know, I think that was very hard because it was like me saying it out loud. Now it's just a story.

And now that story's ended. And now the chapter is close. Me and Selena kind of just wrote that little part to be like, it's over in a good way. Like, I am done. I am okay. I love me. I'm so glad that this happened, but it's just so painful. I think the whole point of Luz You to Love Me is that it's actually honest word for word. And those moments are actually the truth of my story.

I felt like that was what I was needing and that's what I was missing was just a little bit of the truth. But this was actually me letting it go. I felt like I got to do something so great with something that may have been really, difficult for me. It was almost like all those questions like why did I have to walk through that? Why did I need that lesson so many times? Why is it worth it? And then I got the song and I was so overwhelmed with relief and peace. It is one of those moments where you're like, I got it. I went through what I went through. And now this is the best I've ever felt. It's just going to go from here. happens. Here's Lose You to Love Me by Selena Gomez in its entirety.

when it wasn't yours It always go into it blindly I needed to lose you to find me I needed to hate you to love me And they all know it You turn me down and I would show And so you'll replace us Like it was easy

Made me think I deserved it And the thick of healing Yeah, yeah. I fell for it. You first and you adored it. Stayed fast to my forest. And you let it burn. Sing off the key in my chorus.

Visit songexploder.net for more information. You'll find links to buy or stream Lose You to Love Me, and you can watch the music video for it. Plus, you can also watch the trailer for the upcoming Song Exploder Netflix series, which debuts on October 2. You can also go to Netflix.com slash Song Exploder to add it to your list. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Keesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby,

Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is made by me, Rishi Kesh Hirwe, with producer Christian Coons, production assistant Olivia Wood, and illustrator Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective,

of creative, independent podcasts. You can learn more about all the Radiotopia shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can get a Song Exploder T-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. You can also follow the show on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Song Exploder.

My name is Rishi Keshe Your Way. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.