Calling in to chat with Audacy’s Julia, benny blanco shared all about his surprise album with Selena Gomez, 'I Said I Love You First,' detailing how the project came about, and discussing the stories behind the first two singles, plus a whole lot more during an Audacy Check In.

Sharing how the idea for the new album came about, benny revealed, “I think we were just both kind of… just like a little stuck on what we want to do. Selena was talking about not wanting to make music anymore. She felt like she already said everything she's ever wanted to say. And I remember I just had this like a-ha moment where I was like, well, why don't we just do an album together? It would be so fun.”

Noting how he loved it when other musical couples had teamed up on projects, listing off JAY-Z and Beyoncé, and Raw Alejandro and Rosalía as examples, benny thought, “why don't we try?”

“I didn't even know if anyone was gonna hear this,” he went on to admit. “We just made it in our house together, like in our room. And I remember saying like, hey, if this is ever weird, we'll just stop right away.”

As it turns out, it wasn’t weird at all. “It all like flowed out so easily,” benny continued, "and… I feel like through this, I realized how good a partners we were together because… we didn't fight… there was no argument in the studio. All of our ideas came out exactly how we wanted them to, and we had the same intuitions and it was like, if we didn't like something, we both didn't like it. And I don't know, it was kind of like a therapeutic and cathartic experience.”

While the forthcoming album is hardly the first time benny and Selena have worked on music together, aside of Selena’s 2023 summer single “Single Soon,” all the tracks they’ve collaborated on in the past was done as friends. Which according to benny the one major difference between working together before compared to now is that now, “I get to kiss her and we're in love.”

Sharing a few things he thinks will surprise us about the album, benny expressed, clarifying he doesn’t mean lyrically, noting, “she’s always raw in what she's saying. But some of the production is like really pulled back… almost like acoustic like… or it'll be one piano and her, you know. And then obviously there's still like the bops and stuff on there too, but I think it was really cool to try out new things that maybe she's never done before."

“I think people will be surprised that maybe some of the stuff we're talking about," he continued, “It’s about everything. You know, I really want people to take the journey. I don't want to say too much because it's definitely a journey from the beginning, from how it opens up until how it ends.”

Speaking of — how it ends — “Scared of Loving You,” the album’s lead single is actually the last song on the album. Sharing the reason they chose to release that one first, benny said, “I think I just wanted to start by saying like, ‘here's how we feel right now… this is how we feel right now in this moment.’ And then let's go backwards.”

“You know… Selena has been through so much and this song really showed — ‘Hey, I'm not scared of loving you right now, I am scared of losing you.’ And just like everyone else, you do a bunch of things in your life and then you're sitting there and you're like — ‘Oh, I'm really scared to jump into this new thing because if I do, that means I'm giving myself to a person again and like that means the potential for heartbreak again’”, benny added.

Sharing how they were both “a little hesitant to go into it,” once they did, “then you're like, ‘oh my God… I have so much to live for now… Wait, holy s***, don't leave me.'”

Sharing the story behind their second single, “Call Me When You Break Up,” featuring Gracie Abrams, benny revealed he’d previously worked with Gracie on “some of the first music she ever made.. and then I put her on my album in like 2020 or somethi ...