Selena Gomez May Quit Music After Her Next Album

It’s not a great time to be a fan of former Disney kids who go on to have middling careers in pop music – Selena Gomez has revealed she plans to hang up the mic after releasing her next album.

Earlier this week, Gomez appeared as a guest on the SmartLess podcast, chatting to Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett about her sprawling portfolio and future endeavours. During the interview (as transcribed by Rolling Stone), she admitted that a music career seemed fun in her youth, but lost a lot of its appeal as she grew older.

“I started having a lot of fun with music and then touring was really fun,” she said, “but I was doing my TV show [Wizards Of Waverly Place] at the same time and I just found it really fun so I just kept going. But the older I get, the more I’m kind of like, ‘I would like to find something to just settle on.’ I do feel like I have one more album in me, but I would probably choose acting.”

The podcast’s hosts went on to affirm Gomez’s musical skills, and pointed out that she didn’t have to ditch one artistic medium to thrive with the other – but while she agreed, she noted that she’s “going to want to chill because [she’s] tired”.

Gomez went on to explain how a fledging music career became untenable as she was really coming into her own as an artist and an actor, the stress becoming nigh-on debilitating: “I went to a mental institute and cancelled one of my tours. It just got to me because I love working and it distracts me from bad things.”

She noted, too, that she didn’t necessarily plan to become a musician in the first place. It was Disney that steered her in that direction, around the time she started working on her Disney Channel classic Wizards Of Waverly Place (which ran for four seasons and a film between 2007 and 2012), calling the multibillion-dollar company “a machine” that “forcefully require[d]” Gomez to “know how to sing so [she] could sing the theme song”.

She said of Disney’s brand-building savviness: “They know how to package someone and make it a whole triple threat thing.”

As for how that spun into Gomez’s music career lasting long beyond her Disney days, she noted: “I wanted to be an actress, I never really intended on being a singer full-time but apparently that hobby turned into something else. I don’t think I’m the best singer but I do know how to tell stories and I love being able to make songs.”

Gomez is currently working on her fourth solo album, which is expected to arrive sometime in 2024. The as-yet-untitled LP will follow up on her 2020 effort Rare, as well as the 2021 EP Revelación. Since releasing the latter record, she’s dropped three standalone singles: 999 (a joint effort with Camilo) in August 2021, My Mind & Me in November 2022, and Single Soon in August 2023.