Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco’s I Said I Love You First: Steamy Moments, Past Loves and More Decoded

Beyond showcasing a newer sound for Selena—”I just feel comfortable in a lower register and a softer tone,” she told Rolling Stone—this new album also takes an honest look at how her life in the spotlight has shaped her.

In fact the album’s start, “Younger and Hotter Than Me,” is both an homage to Selena navigating stardom as well as the ups and downs of a love lost.

“But I hate myself more,” she sings, “For thinkin’ you were different / Wish I never loved you / We’re not gettin’ any younger / But your girlfriends seem to.”

As she revealed in a behind-the-scenes video released ahead of the album, “It reflects kind of everything I’ve felt before, if that makes sense. I’m so bad at parties. I’m socially awkward. I sit in the corner and talk to the one person who’s usually alone. I don’t feel like I’ve always fit in.”

But where “Scared of Loving You” is a vulnerable confession, songs “Sunset Blvd” and “Cowboy” are provocative flirtations with the audience as Selena sings, in the latter, about riding—and no, she’s not talking about horses.

“I don’t like to share it a lot, but I’m a very sensual person,” she told Spotify ahead of the album’s release. “And I love love and sometimes I put that into words and I can feel sexy, and I love that feeling.”

It’s a lyrical gamble the 32-year-old may not have made in her past.

“I’m more comfortable kind of playing with the lyrics than I used to be,” she admitted, nodding to artists such as Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX—who collaborated on “Bluest Flame”—she says have helped pave the road. “They have opened the door to this interpretive type of cheekiness in their lyrics. I think there’s a little bit more freedom to play.”

And, of course, while it might be easy to draw connections within the album to Selena’s past with Justin Bieber—“Don’t Wanna Cry,” for instance, chronicles a painful on-again, off-again relationship—the Emilia Pérez star cautions against drawing assumptions.

“I would like to say most of this album has nothing to do with what everyone may go to,” she told Spotify. “And I think it’s important for me to say that because I’ve evolved so much, and I have experienced life with new people. I’ve had to go through transitions with friends and lose people in my life and gain new people, and I’ve had a whole new life forever.”

She added, alluding to Benny, “To me, it was about both of our pasts and our history and also just inspired by friends and relationships, like some songs were actually meant [to be] about friendships in my life and I think that’s what to me the album was about.”

After all, with songs like “Love of My Life” and “Bluest Flame,” the album acts more than anything as an homage to her and Benny’s relationship.

“It describes us,” Selena said to Rolling Stone. “This whole project embodies his stories combined with my stories. They have meanings that are really just personal to both of us. So one song could actually mean two different things. And I think it was just really cute.”

Hence the title.

“Yeah, guilty as charged,” Selena owned. “I said ‘I love you’ first.” 

For a look back at Benny and Selena’s sweetest moments, keep reading.