The first four or five or six times I encountered Lady Gaga, in London or Paris or New York, backstage in Vegas or Madison Square Garden or the O2 arena, at the top of the Skytree in Tokyo or from inside a giant replica of her fragrance bottle at a party at the Guggenheim, or even when, six years ago, we hung out in her kitchen in Malibu and danced and cried while listening to music—“Like, real Italian style,” she said—every single one of those times, in all of those places, she was both there and not there. She was viscerally present and accounted for but also somehow absent. This is not a complaint.
We eventually find ourselves in a windowless room in front of a mixing board. As has often been the case, she wants to play me some new music. It is, after all, her primary way of communicating who she is—not just to her fans but also to herself. “There’s a lot of pain associated with this adventure,” she says, “and when I start to explore that pain it can bring out another side to my artistry. When I’m here at this studio, I’m relaxed and I am able to face my demons and what’s remarkable is…that’s the music. I’m able to hear it back.”
At one point, we get into a conversation about her own recent fanaticism. She rattles off a list: Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish. “I mean, I really love them. I go on the internet and, like, cry. And I love Taylor Swift too. And Kesha. I watch it all, and I’m like: Yup. Go! Just Go.” Here, her voice cracks and her eyes well up with tears. “I’m not only cheering them on, I want them to know that my heart is in it with them. And I want them all to feel really happy.” I am strangely moved. “Sorry!” she shouts through a laugh as I hand her a tissue. I get it, I say. She stares at me for a second, blinks a couple of times, and says, “You and I getting together is really important.”
Todd Phillips was a producer on A Star Is Born, which is how he met Gaga. “She’s sort of touched, in a way,” he says. “She can be really hard on herself as a performer. She takes it seriously. But she’s magic, which sounds so simple, but that is actually the only way to describe her abilities.” When there was a script, Phillips sent it to Gaga’s agent, and before long Phillips was at Lady Gaga’s house in Malibu overlooking the Pacific drinking wine. A few weeks later, he returned with Joaquin Phoenix, whom Gaga had never met. “That was really kind of wonderful,” Phillips says. They hung out for hours, and, “as we were driving to dinner, Joaquin said, ‘We should invite her, don’t you think?’ And I was like, ‘Of course, but I don’t think she’s gonna come.’ You know, for some reason, Joaquin is just…a guy, but she’s Lady Gaga. So I called her and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna go to Nobu, do you want to come?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be five minutes behind you.’ She is the most uncomplicated-complicated person I’ve ever met. And that is her beauty as an artist, too.”
The film mucks around in fame and fans and mental illness and monsters—Lady Gaga themes, all. When I ask her how the film, or the character, relates to her own life, she surprises me with this eloquent bit of introspection: “Harley Quinn is a character people know from the ether of pop culture. I had a different experience creating her, namely my experience with mania and chaos inside—for me, it creates a quietness. Sometimes women are labeled as these overly emotional creatures and when we are overwhelmed we are erratic or unhinged. But I wonder if when things become so broken from reality, when we get pushed too far in life, what if it makes you…quiet?”
Her voice cracks again and she takes a moment. “I would say that I worked from a sense-memory perspective: What does it feel like to walk through the world and be…braced, in an intense way. And what happens when you cover up all of the complexities beneath the surface?”
She does eventually play music for me. One song, which was about to be released in a few weeks, is the sublime duet with Bruno Mars “Die With a Smile.” Gaga was in Malibu putting the final touches on her own record when Bruno called out of the blue. “He asked me to come to his studio to hear something,” says Gaga. “It was around midnight when I got there and I was blown away. We stayed up all night finishing the song.” She turns it all the way up. “Bruno and I think the world needs to hear this song,” she says. “It’s some real sh*t. It’s a real conversation. And it’s about love.”
She queues up a song from her new pop record. It’s intense and ominous—an old-school Gaga banger, unsettling but also buoyant. She does not want to say too much about the new record other than to tell me that it was her fiancé’s idea. “Michael is the person who told me to make a new pop record. He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music.’ ” Says Polansky: “Like anyone would do for the person they love, I encouraged her to lean in to the joy of it. On the Chromatica tour, I saw a fire in her; I wanted to help her keep that alive all the time and just start making music that made her happy.”
Chromatica, Gaga’s last pop album, came out in May 2020, right after the world locked down and “Stupid Love” and “Rain on Me” became the soundtrack to that terrible moment. “When I went on the Chromatica Ball tour in 2022,” she says, “that was the first time I’ve performed not in pain in…I don’t even remember.”
Lady Gaga fractured her hip during her Born This Way Ball tour a decade before, which set in motion years of pain from fibromyalgia, a chronic disorder that manifests as widespread muscle pain, her agony documented in the 2017 Netflix film Gaga: Five Foot Two.
The Chromatica tour was an epiphany. “Michael and I did that tour together,” she says. “I did it pain-free! I haven’t smoked pot in years. I’ve, like, changed.” She laughs. “A lot. I feel like this new album, in a lot of ways, is about that time but from a place of happiness instead of misery. And now, Michael and I are really excited to organize our lives—and our marriage—around our creative output as a couple.” She shoots me a look. “Which is really different than, like, doing what other people want you to do.”
By other people she means the music industry—the whole management, record label, touring infrastructure that she’s been living with for nearly 20 years. “For a long time, for most of my career,” she says, “my life was controlled by this business: what people wanted from me; what they hoped I could achieve; how to keep me going. And that can be a lot of pressure and it’s scary. But I feel like I’m finally coming out on the other side.”
