

"Then I just went through hell and scrutiny in the press, which was really unfair and I felt like I wasn't being heard. The reaction to the song "was very kind, which was incredible, because it allowed me to go in the same direction toward this record," Gomez says. She had just released somber Top 10 single The Heart Wants What it Wants on her last label, Hollywood Records, which she performed on the American Music Awards in November as her teary-eyed friend Taylor Swift and church pastor looked on. "I was crying in his office, like, 'I don't know if I can do this, I'm nervous,' " Gomez says.


The album was born from a conversation with Interscope CEO John Janick last fall. "Everybody has that moment in their life where something needs to change and I needed something different." So, she moved out of her parents' house hired a new management team and signed to a new label, Interscope Records, which will release her first album in two years, Revival, on Friday. "I did reach a point where I was very uncomfortable with the circumstances," Gomez, 23, says. Rumors about her canceled tour and "secret" rehab stint ran amok on gossip sites, as she fended off incessant questions about her on-and-off boyfriend Justin Bieber (himself, the center of a media meltdown after a DUI arrest in January 2014). Early last year, the former Disney Channel star was caught in a maelstrom of bad press.
