Gomez hopes to be a ‘source of healing’
Singer embraces Mexican heritage on Spanish album
Selena Gomez has spent the better part of her life taking command over her voice, whether on screen, in song or in her personal life. The 28-year-old first made her name as a child star of beloved shows like “Barney & Friends” and the Disney Channel series “Wizards of Waverly Place” — then set her kiddie credentials aflame by appearing in Harmony Korine’s 2012 art house romp, “Spring Breakers,” cueing her pivot to more PG-13 roles as well as executive producer credits on hot-button shows like “13 Reasons Why.”
Her music career followed the same trajectory in 2012, when she left behind her bubblegum rock band the Scene to cut it as a one-woman act, turning over maximalist dance-floor cuts in 2013’s “Stars Dance” and 2015’s “Revival.” Parting ways with off-and-on flame Justin Bieber, plus a self-imposed mental health sabbatical, helped shape 2020’s “Rare,” her first album in five years and her third consecutive album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Gomez had just begun to celebrate this milestone when, not two months after her album release, the pandemic drove the whole world indoors for the majority of 2020.
Quarantine was a familiar experience for Gomez, who spent years in and out of treatment centers for anxiety and depression; in 2015, she was diagnosed with lupus, a long-term autoimmune disease, that forced her to both undergo chemotherapy and obtain a kidney transplant in 2017.
Though now in remission, Gomez duly took refuge in her Los Angeles home, where she hunkered down with her grandparents and best friends for months. As the pandemic wound on, Gomez turned her house into a makeshift office space for her cosmetics line, Rare Beauty; a television set for her HBO Max cooking show, “Selena + Chef,” and a recording studio for her recently released first Spanish-language EP, “Revelacion,” or “Revelation.”
“The Spanish record wouldn’t have happened, had I just kept going with the pace of my life and all my other commitments,” she said. “A few years ago, I would have never had taken these opportunities because of my
insecurities or things that I was dealing with mentally. It helped me change my outlook — being able to say, ‘If it doesn’t happen right now, that’s OK. That just means it’ll be later or whenever.’ ”
On “Rare,” Gomez delivered soul-baring pop confessionals like “Lose You to Love Me,” singing self-possessed verses with the reverent lilt of a choirgirl.
But on “Revelacion,” Gomez evolves into a sensuous tropical siren, swaying both her body and voice to match the rhythm of the ocean tides.
It’s an intriguing career pivot for Gomez, who was born and raised in a town called Grand
Prairie, on the outskirts of Dallas. Her father, Ricardo Joel Gomez, and her mother, Mandy Teefey, were teenage lovers who went their separate ways when she was 5.
Gomez stayed with her mom, an Anglo American of Italian descent, yet Gomez retained a connection to her Mexican heritage by sharing weekends, holidays and quinceaneras with her father, whose parents first migrated to Texas from Monterrey, Mexico, during the 1970s. “It took 17 years for my grandparents to get citizenship,” says Gomez.
Despite picking up Spanish from her Mexican side of the family, Gomez rarely recorded original songs in the language. Whether featuring on DJ Snake’s 2018 club smash with Ozuna and Cardi B, “Taki Taki,” or opposite J Balvin in 2019 on Tainy and Benny Blanco’s “I Can’t Get Enough,” Gomez deferred most of the Spanish-language lyrics to her Latinx co-stars.
“I didn’t think I was ready to make a record in Spanish,” she said. “I was fluent in Spanish until I started working at 7. Then my job just kinda took over my life.”
It was when producing “Living Undocumented,” a 2019 Netflix docuseries that shadows eight immigrant families living in the United States, that Gomez started to see her waning Spanish fluency not as a barrier but as an opportunity for connection. “Maybe embracing that part of me can be a source of healing for somebody else,” she says.
Wary of being the Chicana interloper in a predominantly Caribbean genre, Gomez wanted to connect with her Hispanic fans through the music they love but remain sensitive to the cultural distinctions between Latinos.
Prior to recording “Revelacion,” she hired Spanish-language coach Leyla Hoyle-Guerrero — who also counts Demi Lovato and Gwen Stefani as clientele — to help freshen her Spanish vocabulary and loosen her accent to better roll with the music.
“There’s a lot of slang that I needed to learn,” says Gomez of the coaching sessions, which became a crash course on unlearning the formal, dated Spanish of her elders. “Spanish changes generationally as well as (geographically). Sometimes I was like, ‘Wait! Hang on! I need to understand!’ ”
Gomez’s namesake, the late Tejana pop queen Selena Quintanilla-Perez, suffered a similar identity crisis for years before her untimely death at 23.
Though long derided by both Anglos and Mexicans south of the border, Quintanilla-Perez, who spoke with a Texan twang and notoriously fumbled through her own interviews in Spanish, worked to legitimize the hybrid sound of Tejano music, as both a Latin and North American folk tradition.
Gomez has always felt the magnitude of the elder Selena’s legacy, especially as a relative newcomer in the Latin pop space.
“It’s an honor to carry her name,” says Gomez.
As soon as it’s safe again, Gomez has set her sights on South America for her first post-pandemic tour. It’s a bucket list item for the star, who previously canceled the Latin American leg of her “Revival” tour in 2016, citing depression and exhaustion caused by lupus.
“South America’s where I would start because we missed it last time and because that’s where my heart is,” she says.
If there is anything to be decoded from Gomez’s “Revelacion,” beyond the lyrics themselves, it’s that defining the contours of her identity — apart from a job title, a relationship or a birthplace — will be a lifelong journey and only for her to steer.
“I don’t have all the answers. There’s no moment when I’m like, ‘OK, guys, I’m healed from everything!’ ” she says. “It’ll always be a roller coaster. I’m just figuring out what track I want to be on.”