Selena Gomez is no longer keeping her feelings to herself, both in the lyrics that appear on her new album Rare, and her explanation of those lyrics, which she gave when sitting down with Apple Music and Genius for a video. The first singles from the Rare era, "Lose You To Love Me" and "Look At Her Now" were surprise windows into the end of her relationship with Justin Bieber, dropping after a long break from music. The title track "Rare," however, is much more about self-love, which is something Gomez admitted to Apple Music and Genius is hard for her to champion. In fact, she often worries about being "alone forever."
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"This isn't the end-all be-all, I'm still a baby," she says at the end of the video. "I got a lot to figure out...Some days, when I wake up and I'm annoyed and I'm like, ‘I'm gonna be alone forever.' But after that 15 minutes goes away, I say to myself, ‘I know that there's someone for everybody.'"
This sentiment is most strongly reflected in the song's chorus, which reads, "I don't have it all / I'm not claiming to /But I know that I’m special (So special), yeah / And I’ll bet there's somebody else out there / To tell me I’m rare."
She also touched on a line that "everybody" loves, "Saw us gettin' older (Older) / Burnin' toast in my toaster."
"I think it, basically, represents mundane," she continues. "It represents the lack of care that's around you and for the things that you love and care about…Everyone's dropped the ball and nobody's really in this."
Despite the fact that pretty much everyone is aware that his album dissects her split from Justin Bieber, who is now married to Hailey Baldwin, it also represents Gomez closing the book on that chapter of her life.
"I had to find a way to understand it as an adult. And I had to understand the choices I was making," she told NPR about the emotional abuse she said she suffered during her relationship with the "Yummy" singer. "As much as I definitely don’t want to spend the rest of my life talking about this, I am really proud that I can say I feel the strongest I’ve ever felt and I’ve found a way to just walk through it with as much grace as possible."
Watch the full lyric-decoding video below.