Her recent albums span an emotional register that begins at “personal” and ends somewhere around “crushingly confessional,” songs she says arrived via some alchemy of emotional messiness, Chinese takeout, and serious dishing.
Welcome.įor a while now, one could say this has been a signature of Gomez’s appeal, this sort of wide-armed embrace of the human condition. When she returns, she plops into a white leather salon-style chair and launches into a tale of how, just prior to my arrival, she’d been eating an acai bowl only to realize that “my entire face was purple.” The general vibe here is clear: We are human. Gomez hugs me anyway, then scurries off down a hallway to confer with a young woman about the air conditioning. By this point, I may be perspiring a bit. She says this is true both “literally and figuratively,” and she says it while I am rolling my own literal baggage across the threshold of her Los Angeles home, having first rolled it past the security gate, then up the verdant hill, then along the glimmering pool, before depositing it in a sort of glam room with a flowery rug and a view of the patio through open glass doors.
