“Do you have an auxiliary cord?” the grown-up tween idol asked her driver on a recent Monday afternoon, queuing up a Spotify playlist (“It’s kind of all over the place”) and reaching into the front seat to crank the volume on a Christian rock song. One Direction, Nicki Minaj and the indie group Chromatics followed.Ms. Gomez, like seemingly every other 23-year-old in the country, scrolled inattentively through Instagram and agreed to order sushi via an app as she rapped along to Drake under her breath (“Trigger fingers turn to Twitter fingers …”).
If she hadn’t recalled her stint, at the age of 7, on “Barney & Friends,” it was almost possible to forget Ms. Gomez’s child star bona fides: four seasons of a popular Disney show, “Wizards of Waverly Place”; four studio albums under the company’s music arm, Hollywood Records; and a soul-draining teen romance saga with Justin Bieber. But that’s all in her past now — sort of.
In an attempt to declare her rebirth as an independent, confident adult woman, Ms. Gomez will release “Revival,” her first album for Interscope, on Oct. 9. Yet while the music’s thematic awakenings (personal, professional, sexual) are meant to supplant her previous personas — tidily packaged goody-goody in her work, baby bird with broken wings in the tabloids — the songs are also savvily exploiting those same public stories and preconceptions. As Ms. Gomez sings on the album’s opener: “What I’ve learned is so vital/More than just survival/This is my revival.”
The risk, however, is getting bogged down in past associations that threaten to eclipse her obvious growth as a performer. So Ms. Gomez must mine her experiences while trying to avoid a pop star identity that’s only refracted through others, be it Mr. Bieber or Taylor Swift, her longtime industry BFF who also sought in recent years to own the ugly chatter about her relationships with a new sense of agency and emphasis on female friendship.
The run-up to the album had to be carefully considered: The lead single, “Good for You,” featuring a sly verse from ASAP Rocky, is a statement of self-worth and sexual power as breathy come-on, conjuring none of Ms. Gomez’s ghosts. Only after its unexpected summer success — the mid-tempo song recently hit No. 1 on Billboard’s pop chart and landed at No. 5 on the Hot 100 — did Interscope release the more obvious single “Same Old Love,” a defiant but wounded kiss-off about a trampled heart.
While she plans to address her past, she is hyper-aware of how she has been perceived. “It’s all part of my story,” Ms. Gomez said while not quite relaxing in a Beverly Hills hotel suite before boarding the S.U.V. to rehearsal. “I’m growing and changing. I was in a relationship, and I was being managed by my parents, and I was still under Hollywood and Disney, and I was being held to this expectation of being the good girl.” She continued: “I knew deep down that this wasn’t what I wanted to do — being exhausted of forcing something that wasn’t right, even in my personal life. I had to have moments where I was crying and I was like, ‘Why am I not in love with what I do?’ I was forced to get very uncomfortable for a while in order to make the decisions I made.
Poised without seeming robotic, Ms. Gomez can also be a ball of nerves, making her perhaps the most earthbound of her generation’s Disney graduates (Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato). She said she is prone to overthinking, endures episodes of “angst” and is extra-sensitive to uncomfortable situations. (“Had major anxiety at the airport,” she tweeted recently to more than 32 million followers. “Not feeling good at all.”)
Years of paparazzi attention and interest in her barely pubescent love life contributed to the guarded uneasiness just under her shimmery surface. Ms. Gomez recalled thinking: “I need my work to just outshine all of this because the noise is driving me crazy, and it’s preventing me from leaving my home. When I walk into a place and people look at me, they don’t see an artist.” Still, she took to a new path tentatively. Rather than shattering her Disney halo and leaving loyal fans, known as “Selenators,” behind, Ms. Gomez matured in fits and starts, always referencing her past eras.
Before signing with Interscope in December 2014, Ms. Gomez took a bigger stride toward independence with a final, contract-fulfilling single for Disney. “The Heart Wants What It Wants” begins with a tearful monologue and addresses her relationship with Mr. Bieber all but explicitly.“My public life was doing all the speaking for me, for a moment,” Ms. Gomez said. While the gossip press “made it their mission to make me seem meek and small,” she added, “I translated that into my music.”
Her openness carried over to sessions for “Revival.” Along with producers and songwriters of the moment (the Max Martin acolytes Mattman & Robin, Hit-Boy, Benny Blanco), Ms. Gomez, who is listed as executive producer and has writing credits on six songs, worked with a slew of young women, including Charli XCX (“Same Old Love”), Julia Michaels (“Revival,” “Good for You”) and Chloe Angelides (the is-it-Bieber anthem “Sober”).
Justin Tranter, another “Revival” songwriter, said that Ms. Gomez was realistic about playing into the gossip. “Those questions do come up while writing,” he said. “Of course we don’t want everything to feel like it’s feeding into the tabloids, but also we need the song to win. She’s smart enough to know that.”
The release of “Revival” happens to coincide, for better or worse, with the re-emergence of a humbled Mr. Bieber, who faces a similar dilemma with a new album due Nov. 13. Asked recently by Ellen DeGeneres if his new single, “What Do You Mean?,” is about Ms. Gomez, he could only fidget and grimace. (Mr. Janick acknowledged the promotional overlap but added, “We’re not exploiting it in any way.”) While avoiding speaking Mr. Bieber’s name, Ms. Gomez said she was heartened by their parallel successes. “While people were writing that I was stupid for being in it, this is what I always saw in him,” she said. “I’m like, duh!”
Ms. Gomez is careful now to balance her camera-ready self with a more low-key version. Last month, she gamely posed with Ms. Swift’s girl gang of models and actresses at the MTV Video Music Awards. “Taylor is a lot more trusting than I am,” she said. “I have trust issues, given my situation. She’s very open, so she brings out this other side of me.” But after a night among starlets, Ms. Gomez returned home to the celebrity suburb of Calabasas, to eat cookies with her two roommates (a realtor and a nonprofit employee.)
“In the last two years, I’ve seen Selena start to make her career her own,” Ms. Swift said. “She’s separated her opinion out and prioritized it above anyone else’s. Her childhood was defined by working hard, with the major business decisions primarily being made by others. The coolest part of watching her grow up has been seeing her gradually take the creative reins and start to steer the ship.”
Ms. Gomez said she’s getting used to the autonomy. “I definitely remind myself that I’m in control,” she said. “I feel like ultimately if I sit down and I think about a decision I need to make, it’s really within myself. I make the decision. Everything goes through me.”