I believe in Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco who are promoting their album in joint interview with Rolling Stone

Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco’s album, I Said I Love You First, comes out on Friday. They’ve been promoting it together everywhere.

Here they are in New York for dinner last night after interviewing each other on Spotify and this joint interview with Rolling Stone.

I was smiling the whole time reading it. These may be words to regret later but I believe in them. I believe he adores her. I believe she adores him. And maybe it’s that I haven’t been looking around too hard for it but I don’t see that there’s a lot of cynicism about these two, and the fact that they’ve put together a whole album about their love for each other. Which… I mean…

In this business, usually it’s a recipe for disaster, right? There are countless examples of lovers who’ve made movies together only to implode immediately after. Last year JLo released an album all about how, um, whole she felt with Ben Affleck in her life. And he was right there encouraging her, producing the two film projects that accompanied the record, even shooting some of the footage. Only to ghost her literally a month after it came out. In one of those films, JLo even included Jane Fonda urging her to hold back, to not go all in and so public with the relationship and, well, it turns out Jane was right. Of course she was right. Jane has seen some things, she’s been through it with her fair share of men.

So, to go back to Selena and Benny, they were dating secretly for six months before going public around the end of 2023. By the end of 2024 he had proposed, with Taco Bell, and they shared it on Instagram. Now it’s the album, a work that apparently sets to music their relationship up to this point. Usually we’d be nervous, right? I know I would be.

But I’m not. Maybe it’s that I don’t have the energy to be anxious about this when there’s so much f-cksh-t happening all the time, two people in love shouldn’t be on that list. Maybe it’s that Selena seems better than she’s ever been and is sharing her life with someone who seems to truly, truly appreciate her? Obviously we can’t ever really know from the outside, and these people are paid to perform and sell so we’ve all built up a certain skepticism about how much of what we see is the truth. But it would be nice, wouldn’t it? If what looks like the real deal is the real deal?

Also, I like how she sounds on the tracks that have been released so far. My favourite is “Sunset Boulevard”, the playfulness of it, her smile of affection when she looks at him in the video. How cute they are when they’re dancing together. It’s catchy and moody, a drive home song on a hot summer night. She told Rolling Stone that she was “very frustrated and kind of confused on where I wanted to go next musically. And we had been together for a while, and obviously I would confide in him. I couldn’t figure out my sound.” With Benny, I think they found it together.