Wednesday, Sep 23, 2020 • 19min
Selena Gomez - Lose You to Love Me
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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.
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Selena Gomez
Justin Tranter
Hrishikesh Hirway
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Transcript
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Hrishikesh Hirway
00:00
You're listening to
song Exploder
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. My name is Hrishikesh Hirway.Share
Break
Hrishikesh Hirway
01:24
Selena 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.Share
01:41
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?
Share
Selena Gomez
01:54
Do I think my story intrigues people in a different way? Obviously it does, that's unfortunately how it works, but this song alone represents what a lot of people who are heartbroken have gone through.
Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
02:11
For the song
Lose You to Love Me
, Selena
teamed up with the Grammy
winning production duo Mattman & Robin
, who had 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 was named BMI
Pop songwriter of the year.Share
02:32
Selena,
Julia
and Justin
have written 10 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.
Share
02:51
In this episode,
Selena Gomez
tells the story of how Lose You To Love Me
was made. I also spoke to Julia Michaels
and Justin Tranter
. Selena
explains why she worked with them for this song.Share
Selena Gomez
03:04
I gave my all, and they all know it, you turned me down, and now it's showing, in two months, you replaced us, like it was easy, made me think I deserved it, in the thick of healing. I'm
Selena Gomez
.Share
03:27
I work with tons of writers that I 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.Share
Julia Michaels
03:60
My name is
Julia Michaels
.Share
Justin Tranter
04:02
My name is
Justin Tranter
.Share
Julia Michaels
04:04
Like, a good 90% of the songs that I write are with
Justin
.Share
Justin Tranter
04:08
But there's something so special about me,
Julia
, and Selena
together.Share
Selena Gomez
04:12
In the beginning, I kind of would take one break down, another breakdown and slowly, but surely it was, it was all of us sharing, you know, our lives together.
Share
Julia Michaels
04:22
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.Share
Selena Gomez
04:32
I was working with
Mattman & Robin
and I actually have worked with them millions of times, and they're kind of like adjusting Julia
to me, we have like a good power team going on when we all work together.Share
Julia Michaels
04:45
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?
Share
Selena Gomez
05:10
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.
Share
Justin Tranter
05:19
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.Share
Julia Michaels
05:37
And I said to
Justin
was like, I feel like we should do a ballad, so Robin started playing some chords on the piano.Share
Justin Tranter
05:56
Me and
Julia
just started to go and get ideas started and melody started and sections started for her.Share
Selena Gomez
06:04
What I remember going in, it was like, I just saw the four people I was working on a song with, and they were just like, "how you doing?" I said, "I honestly don't know", I kind of felt defeated and sat down, and they just played me the cords.
Share
06:23
And
Julia
then started humming, and it was just like it like, brought tears to my eyes.Share
Julia Michaels
06:29
She just started crying, she was like, "this is so beautiful, this is exactly what I wanted".
Share
Selena Gomez
06:35
All of a sudden, it was just the melodies, and it all just came out naturally. You promised the world and I fell for it, I put you first, and you adored it, set fires to my forest, and you let it burn, sang off-key in my chorus,'cause it wasn't yours.
Share
Justin Tranter
06:59
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.
Share
Selena Gomez
07:11
We'd always go into it blindly, I needed to lose you to find me, this dancing was killing me softly, I needed to hate you to love me. That's word for word, what I felt.
Share
Julia Michaels
07:32
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 and reflect on myself in order to grow and learn.
Share
07:47
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".
Share
Justin Tranter
08:01
Pretty much, syllable for syllable of the second versus all
Selena
.Share
Selena Gomez
08:06
I gave my all, and they all know it, you turned me down, and now it's showing, in two months, you replaced us, like it was easy, made me think I deserved it, in the thick of healing.
Share
Justin Tranter
08:24
I was like, this song is coming out. Are you sure you're willing to go there to be this honest about your journey? And she was like, "of course we're going there. Are we trying to tell the story? And we're trying to like to let people heal through my healing? Then we have to go there".
Share
08:40
One of her superpowers has been so honest, and she's going to give you her life. In the lyric, but then when she gets on 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.
Share
Selena Gomez
09:01
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's sometimes easier for me to get out emotions when I'm doing a scene or working with someone that or a director that pulls that out of me.
Share
09:25
But when I start getting in the studio I started 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.
Share
09:50
To love, love, yeah, to love, love, yeah, to love, yeah, I needed to lose you to love me, yeah, to love, love, yeah, to love, love, yeah, to love, yeah, 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 were almost celebrating with me and those are the moments you can let loose in the studio. To love, love, yeah, to love, love, yeah, to love, yeah.Share
10:34
The chanting is such an important part of the song, and it's the part where it's like the cliché, open your arms wide and just like scream and let all of it out.
Share
Justin Tranter
10:45
And then
Mattman & Robin
with all their magic somehow made it sound like there was, you know, a thousand of us.Share
Selena Gomez
10:57
To love, love, yeah, to love, love, yeah, to love, yeah. I thought that was just so beautiful. To love, love, yeah, to love, love, yeah, to love, yeah.
Share
Julia Michaels
11:07
I remember doing the to love, love, yeah.
Share
Justin Tranter
11:10
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 special.
Share
Selena Gomez
11:22
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.
Share
11:44
The string parts of this song just kill me.
Share
Justin Tranter
11:48
That sort of bass pluck, high plucked, bass pluck, high pluck.
Share
Selena Gomez
11:53
When I hear it instantly know it takes me to that place, and it almost makes it feel to me like a ballerina. We'd always go into it blindly, I needed to lose you to find me, this dancing was killing me softly, I needed to hate you to love me.
Share
12:21
And then we got this really cool idea that
FINNEAS
would maybe take it to a whole other level, like, we know that he does so well.Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
12:31
Finneas
O'Connell
aka FINNEAS
is an artist and producer. He won the 2020 Grammy
for Producer of the Year for his work on his sister Billie Eilish
his album.Share
Selena Gomez
12:42
His extra touches and that kind of windy feeling, it just added a texture to the song, you know, I'm like "that's how do you even come up with that?"
Share
12:55
It was weird, and that's what made it cool.
Share
13:01
It was supposed to be released around fall, the new season new artist if you will, and he made it feel that way.
Share
13:17
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 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.
Share
13:44
One of the hardest things for me to sing in the song was the bridge. It's the ending of the song, and it's 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.
Share
14:07
Now it's just a story, and now that story has ended. And now the chapter is closed and done, to love, love, yeah, to love, love, yeah, to love, yeah, and now it's goodbye, it's goodbye for us.
Share
Justin Tranter
14:31
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.Share
Selena Gomez
14:46
I'm so glad that this happened, but it's just so painful. Like, I think the whole point of
Lose You To Love Me
is that it's actually honest word for word, and those moments are actually the truth of my story.Share
15:01
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.
Share
15:18
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.
Share
15:33
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, we'll see what happens.
Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
15:54
And now here's
Lose You To Love Me
by Selena Gomez
in its entirety.Share
16:08
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 2nd. You can also go to Netflix. com/songexploder to add it to your list.Share
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Hrishikesh Hirway
20:47
Song Exploder
is made by me Hrishikesh Hirway with producer Christian Koons, 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.Share
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Hrishikesh Hirway
21:22
My name is
Hrishikesh Hirway
, thanks for listening. Radiotopia
from PRX.Share
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Hrishikesh Hirway
Selena Gomez
Julia Michaels
Justin Tranter