Behind every No. 1 hit is a long time spent at the drawing board, and Selena Gomez‘s “Lose You to Love Me” is no exception. As she gears up to release new music, the 30-year-old pop star took fans down memory lane Monday night (July 17) with a raw behind-the-scenes video of her writing process for the 2019 chart-topper, featuring her sitting alone at a piano with nothing but her voice and a handful of lyrics to go off of.
Posted to her TikTok account, the video shows Gomez with her hair pulled back in a bun as she diligently practices the piano accompaniment to what would become “Lose You to Love Me,” which she co-wrote with Julia Michaels, Justin Tranter and producer duo Mattman & Robin. Largely believed to be about her final breakup with Justin Bieber, the track served as the lead single for her Billboard 200-topping third album, Rare, and marked her first ever No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, assisted by a vulnerable black-and-white music video shot entirely on iPhone.
Some of the lyrics fall into place as Gomez sings over shaky piano in her TikTok — struggling a bit when she gets to the song’s chorus — whereas others were still blank spaces at the time it was filmed. “Making of… me getting to know myself,” reads a chunk of black text on the top left.
“This isnt the greatest i know so i hope no one minds me turning the comments off for my head,” the Only Murders In the Building star captioned the video. “but this was the best, most sincere moments with lose you to love me.”
The sentimental video comes a few months after Gomez celebrated “Lose You to Love Me” surpassing the billion-streams benchmark on Spotify, her first solo track to do so. “Grateful,” she wrote at the time in response to the March milestone.
In 2020, the Rare Beauty founder opened up to Billboard about the emotional challenges of composing the single, throughout which she was admittedly “kind of a mess.” “It was really difficult for me,” she said then. “And by the time we shot the music video at the end of the year, it had a completely different meaning, and it was so freeing. It was actually fun for me – I think, because I let it go, it actually meant that I let it go within myself as well. And I couldn’t have asked for a better way to close a chapter in my life.”
Watch Selena’s video below:
