All The Endless Places

Selena Gomez “Cut You Off”

“Cut You Off” falls into the same category as a lot of Ariana Grande’s best music: Sophisticated pop music bankrolled by the success of more market-oriented hits. Selena Gomez has great taste in melody – she favors a lot of busy-but-gracefully-light melodic turns, a thing I’m a real sucker for – and she’s shown a consistent interest in understated but stylish use of guitar. This song covers both, along with her draw towards music that conveys a low-key neuroticism. “Cut You Off” is about deciding to fully break it off with someone she’s been with for “1460 days” – so Bieber, then? – while sounding a bit nervous and wishy-washy about actually going through with it.

The distance between the lyrical proclamations and the cautious feel of the music is obviously the whole point here, and the arrangement is a series of contrasts between moments of floaty bliss and gently thudding hesitancy. The guitar solo near the end, performed by co-writer and producer David Pramik, is intriguing in the way it starts off restating the main melody with a touch of bluesy slickness but gets more halting as it goes along, like someone overthinking and getting self-conscious. If the song ended there, you’d be left assuming she backed down from a good idea, but instead it ends by just cutting off. A happy ending, basically.

Buy it from Amazon.