Call Me An Amenity

Selena Gomez “Bad Liar”

If I’m being honest with you, I really didn’t expect my favorite pop song of 2017 thus far to come from Selena Gomez, a singer who up until just now I’d considered kinda boring and not particularly talented. But here we are, and I’m happy to have been wrong about her.

“Bad Liar” is mainly written by Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, who’ve worked together on Gomez’s music in the past and have clearly learned the best way to showcase Gomez’s personality is to not crowd her voice and allow space for the nuances in her phrasing to thrive. The Gomez of “Bad Liar” is flustered by her infatuation, and the verses have a low key anxious energy – she’s beating herself up a bit, and making odd references and jokes that are considerably more clever than what you’d reasonably expect from contemporary mainstream pop. The Selena Gomez in this song is a very clearly recognizable person – I’m not sure if it’s Gomez, per se, but it’s an intriguing and relatable character. Gomez’s previous hits with Michaels and Tranter, “Good for You” and “Hands to Myself,” cover similar ground, and convincingly present the singer as the pop star for horny introverts.

Gomez’s phrasing in this song is outstanding, tilting from the dry, understated humor of the verses to a sweet, high hypnotic tone for the chorus. Her voice may seem reedy and thin in other contexts, but here it’s perfectly suited to the melody and structure and conveys just the right balance of lust and neurosis.

And yes, that is the bass line from Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” It’d be easy for Gomez, Michaels, and Tranter to be lazy and just let that familiar, perfect groove do all the work in the song, but there’s so many strong hooks and interesting moments in “Bad Liar” that it kinda just settles into the background as this twitchy pulse that connects the sentiment of the song to the anxiety pop of 40 years ago.

Buy it from Amazon.