Pop

Selena Gomez opened up on her newly curated SiriusXM Radio channel on Thursday (Nov. 3) about one of the many reasons she admires Taylor Swift.

“The most influential artist, for me, it is kind of Taylor,” the singer said of her bestie. “Not because she’s my friend, but she has been an artist that can transition into so many different genres and she is able to do it seamlessly and I admire that so much. And that’s so rare. I love her process and I just admire all the work that she’s done. She’s definitely inspired me.”

While Swift pivoted back to diaristic pop with her latest record-smashing No. 1 album Midnights last month, Gomez’s most recent studio set remains 2020’s Rare, which contained her first No. 1 hit “Lose You to Love Me” as well as follow-up singles “Look At Her Now,” “Rare” and “Boyfriend.” (One year later, she also showcased in her Mexican roots on the Spanish-language EP Revelación.)

Gomez has been busy promoting her new documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, which premieres Friday (Nov. 4) on Apple TV+. “I guess when we started to record footage of the Revival Tour, we initially thought that we were gonna do a concert tour video, and during the tour I had to cancel it because I was going through a lot of stuff personally. So we decided to stop,” she explained of the project’s origins.

“Then the Kenya trip kind of came up and we decided we wanted to record that trip. So it really wasn’t gonna be a documentary until the end when we filmed all the stuff and where I am now,” the singer continued. “I can tell that it was gonna be something bigger than just a puff piece…I want it to be about the conversation around mental health and ways that we can change the conversation. I feel like a human sacrifice. I’m like throwing my personal life in to hopefully have this conversation be bigger and transcend.”

Listen to more from Selena’s SiriusXM radio show below.

Selena Gomez has been very open about her mental health struggles and feelings of despair as a child, and then young woman, growing up in front of the cameras. But in a new Rolling Stone cover story the Only Murders in the Building star opens up about the depths of her battle against depression and bipolar disorder, subjects she takes on with her signature no-BS style in the new Apple TV+ documentary, Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me (Nov. 4).
According to the piece, just minutes into the series, we see Gomez cancelling her 2016 Revival tour early in order to tearfully check-in to a treatment facility, as well scenes in which she is, “unable to get out of bed, scenes of her lashing out at friends, scenes of her roaming her house aimlessly [and] scenes of her coming apart in the middle of a press tour.” In fact, it was so real that up until a few weeks ago Gomez said she considered pulling the plug on the doc.

“Because I have the platform I have, it’s kind of like I’m sacrificing myself a little bit for a greater purpose,” she told the magazine. “I don’t want that to sound dramatic, but I almost wasn’t going to put this out. God’s honest truth, a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure I could do it.”

But, she tells RS, sharing the story was important, which might explain why she also revealed some of the most difficult struggles she’s faced in her life off-camera. “I’m going to be very open with everybody about this: I’ve been to four treatment centers,” Gomez said. “I think when I started hitting my early twenties is when it started to get really dark, when I started to feel like I was not in control of what I was feeling, whether that was really great or really bad.”

Those high and low periods sometimes found her not sleeping for days, or convinced that she should buy everyone she knows a car and that she had a gift she wanted to share with the world. That mania, however, would then give way to the lowest lows, which she said would begin with depression and then tip into scary isolation. “Then it just was me not being able to move from my bed. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me,” she said. “My friends would bring me food because they love me, but none of us knew what it was. Sometimes it was weeks I’d be in bed, to where even walking downstairs would get me out of breath.”

And though she said she never attempted suicide, Gomez told RS she spent several years contemplating it. “I thought the world would be better if I wasn’t there,” she said. Between her mental health struggles and a diagnosis of the autoimmune disease lupus that required a 2017 kidney transplant which triggered a potentially fatal complication, Gomez said she worried that the life she’d once dreamt of was not in the cards.

“I grew up thinking I would be married at 25,” she said. “It wrecked me that I was nowhere near that — couldn’t be farther from it. It was so stupid, but I really thought my world was over.” A year after the surgery, Gomez said she began hearing voices, which eventually triggered an episode of psychosis. Though her memories of the period are hazy now, the RS piece describes her ending up in a treatment center and spending “several months in paranoia, unable to trust anyone, thinking they were all out to get her.”

That led to her bipolar diagnosis, which helped her make sense of what had just happened, but also meant she was so heavily medicated that she began to lose her essential self. “It was just that I was gone,” she said of the drugs’ effect on her. “There was no part of me that was there anymore.” A psychiatrist scaled back all but two of the meds and as Gomez began to detox she said she had to “learn how to remember certain words. I would forget where I was when we were talking. It took a lot of hard work for me to (a) accept that I was bipolar, but (b) learn how to deal with it because it wasn’t going to go away.”

Aware that the psychosis could return and that her bipolar diagnosis will have to be managed for the rest of her life, Gomez said after her initial concerns she felt the AppleTV+ doc was a part of her story she wanted to share. “I know it has a big message, but am I the right person to bring it to light? I don’t know,” she recalled wondering. “I wanted someone to say, ‘Selena, this is too intense.’ But everyone was like, ‘I’m really moved, but are you ready to do this? And are you comfortable?’”

She couldn’t bring herself to watch the doc at an Apple+ screening, but she did keep an eye on the audience and immediately sensed the right answer. “I was like, ‘OK, if I can just do that for one person, imagine what it could do,’” she recalled thinking. “Eventually I just kind of went for it. I just said, ‘Yes.’”

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.

If you do the math, Ed Sheeran has a new album coming in 2023. The singer/songwriter teased the follow-up to his 2021 = (Equals) album on Wednesday (Nov. 2) from what sounds like the wind-swept set of a new music video as he celebrated reaching yet another impressive career milestone.

“So ‘Shivers’ has just hit a billion streams on Spotify, which makes it my 11th song as an artist and 15th song as a writer… I’m over the moon about it, thank you everyone who’s been streaming that song,” a smiling Sheeran said in a short video clip in which the wind can be heard howling in the background.

“I’m gonna celebrate by shooting a music video for my brand new album, which will be out next year,” he added with a grin. At press time no additional information was available on the project, which hyperventilating fans speculated in the comments could be called Subtract, in keeping with the mathematical theme of Sheeran’s album titles.

Subtract would make sense considering Sheeran debuted in 2011 with + (Plus), followed up in 2014 with x (Multiply), then 2017’s ÷ (Divide) and last year’s = (Equals).

Last month, Sheeran and frequent songwriting partner Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid won the European song of the year award from BMI for their global smash “Bad Habits” at the 2022 BMI London Awards. The award is given to BMI’s most performed song of the previous year by U.K. or European writers. The single spent 11 consecutive weeks at the top of the Official U.K. Singles Chart. Sheeran previously won the award in 2016, 2017 and 2018. The 2018 award was for “Shape of You,” which he also co-wrote with McDaid.

Check out Sheeran’s new album announcement below.

Selena Gomez is all good with Hailey Bieber. After years of discourse pitting the two against one other over Justin Bieber, the women recently shut down the chatter by posing for photos together at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures 2nd Annual Gala. And on Wednesday (Nov. 2), Gomez addressed their decision to snap the pics in the first place.

“Yeah, it’s not a big deal. It’s not even a thing,” she told Vulture at the tail end of a joint interview with filmmaker Alek Keshishian promoting her new documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, which premieres Friday (Nov. 4) on Apple TV+.

During the chat, the pop star also teased that she’s been hard at work “for years” on the follow-up to 2020’s Rare. “Only because I want to be able to grow through my music,” she said. “I am the person who’s terrified of what will happen once it’s out, so I want it to be really well done and representative of where I am. There is a bunch of fun stuff that I’m so eager to leak, if I’m being honest. I shall not. But I’m so excited. It’ll be fun and refreshing, I think.”

The documentary exploring Gomez’s mental and physical health journey since canceling the latter half of her 2016 Revival Tour does contain one new song by the singer titled, appropriately, “My Mind and Me.”

“It happened in a really organic way,” she teased to the publication of the track. “I  went through this moment where I was allowing people into my life through my journal, these producers who worked on the song and know me very well.

“I remember releasing all of this stuff to them, and I was scared of what they were going to think,” Gomez continued. “But ‘My Mind and Me,’ the idea and the chorus, came up, and it was really moving to me. These people took my story and made it something bigger than me.”