My biggest fear? Be alone

Nobody wants to be alone, and no job is more insulating than being a pop star.

Just ask Lady Gaga.

Her rise to fame in 2009-10 was different than everything we had seen before. One of the first pop stars to use the power of the internet, it seemed to exist in a permanent attack by TMZ photos and gossip blogs.

Their appetite was vorially. She was wearing so many looks and sounds in the room of three years that one critic wrote that she was “Speed-Running Madonna’s entire career”.

And as her fame grew, the headlines were released more. She organized a satanic ritual in a hotel in London … She was secretly a Hermafrodite … She was planning to abandon her own leg “for fashion”.

When she attended the MTV awards of 2010 in a dress that was completely made of meat, nobody seemed to get the joke: Gaga presented herself as food for the gossip magazines, to be consumed.

On stage she was an object of worship for her fans, the small samples. But everyone who is not a megalomaniac knows that that kind of adulation is a distant illusion.

“I am alone, Brandon. Every night,” Gaga told her stylist in the documentary 2017, Five Foot Two.

“I go from everyone who touches me all day and talks to me all day to total silence.”

Now 38, and fortunately engaged to tech entrepreneur Michael Polansky, Gaga admits that those years of loneliness scored her.

“I think my greatest fear did this alone – do life alone,” she tells the BBC.

“And I think the biggest gift has met my partner, Michael, and is in the chaos with him.”

The couple has been together since 2020 and unveiled their engagement at the Venice Film Festival last September – where Gaga wore its engagement ring of a million dollars in public for the first time.

Personally, it is dazzling, with a huge, oval cut diamond on an 18-carat white and rose-gold diamond pavé band.

But on her other hand, Gaga has a smaller, more modest ring, with a few grass sheets in resin. That turns out that this Is the really special one.

“Michael actually introduced me with these grass magazines,” she reveals.

“Long ago we were in the back garden and he asked me,” If I ever introduced you, like, how do I do that? “

“And I just said,” Just get a blade of grass from the back garden and wrap it around my finger and that will make me so happy. “

It was a deep romantic gesture that came from grief. Gaga’s back garden in Malibu had previously hosted the wedding of her good friend, Sonja Durham, shortly before she died of cancer in 2017.

“There was so much loss, but this happy thing happened to me,” she recalls Polansky’s proposal.

“To be engaged to the age of 38 … I thought of what was needed to come right now.”

Those feelings eventually informed a song about her new album, Mayhem.

(Of course) called Grassmes, thinks the star sings about one “Lovers’ Kiss in a garden made of thorns“, and the promise of love in a time of darkness.

She calls it a “thank you” to her partner. And fans may also have a reason to thank him.

Mayhem marks Gaga’s full throttle back to Pop, after a period in which she had been busy with her film career and spin-off albums that have debated in Jazz and the classical American songbook.

Last year the singer spoke with Vogue, revealed that it was her fiancé who had bumped her in that direction.

“He said,” Babe. I love you. You have to make pop music ‘, ” she said.

“During the Chromatica tour I saw a fire in her,” said Polansky. “I wanted to help her always keep that alive and just make music that made her happy.”

With that approach, the album goes back to the Sukkel-Punch sound of Gaga’s early hits such as Poker Face, just dancing and born in this way.

On the latest single, Abracadabra, she even visits the “Rome-Ma-Ma“Gibberish of bad romance – although this time there is a reference to death, as she sings,”Morta -o -gaga“.

In the artwork of the album, her face is reflected in a broken mirror. In the videos she is on earlier versions of herself.

There is an overwhelming feeling that the artist Stefani Germanotta is counting with the theater person she has made.

It all comes to a peak on a song called Perfect Celebrity where she sings: “I became a notorious being” – A text that, just like the meat dress in front, takes away its humanity.

“That is probably the most angry song about fame I have ever written,” she says.

“I had made this public personality that I really became in every way – and held the duality of it, knowing where I am starting and Lady Gaga ends, was really a challenge.

“It took me down a bit.”

How did she reconciled the public and private sides of her life?

“I think I actually realized it is healthier not Have a dividing line and to integrate those two things into one whole person, “she says.

“The healthiest thing for me was that I am a female artist and that an artistic life was my choice.

“I am a fan of songwriting. I am a fan of making music, rehearsing, choreography, stage production, costumes, lighting, gaining a show.

“That is what it means to be Lady Gaga. It’s the artist behind all this.”

In earlier interviews, the musician spoke about how she dissociated from Lady Gaga. For a while she believed that the character was responsible for all her success and she had not contributed anything.

Mayhem marks the moment when she returns the ownership of her music, not only of “Lady Gaga”, but of other producers and writers in her job.

“When I was younger, people tried to honor my sound, or my image [but] All my references, all my imagination of what could be pop music, came from me.

“So I really wanted to review my earlier inspirations and my career and possess it as my invention, once and for all.”

From the start it was clear that Gaga was enthusiastic about this new phase.

Last summer, after performance at the Olympic opening ceremony, she went the streets of Paris and played early demos of her new music To fans who had gathered outside her hotel.

It was a spur of the decision, but it meant another attempt to restore the spontaneity of her early career.

“This has been something I have done for almost 20 years, where I played my fans my music before it came out,” she says.

“I used to invite fans backstage after my shows, and we would hang out and I would play them demos and see what they thought of the music.

“I am sure you can imagine that after 20 years you will not expect that people will still show up to hear your music and be excited to see you. So I just wanted to share it with them, because I was excited that they were there.”

As an interviewer, this is also a full-circle moment for me. I last interviewed Lady Gaga in 2009As a normal dance hit number one in the UK.

At the time, she was dizzy with excitement, enthusiastic chat about her love for John Lennon, herself a “heroin addict” called English tea and promised me an MP3 of Blueberry cushion in e -mailing -a non -released song that, very brilliant, is about performing a sexual action while your breath smells of a sexual action while your breath smells of a sexual action.

Over the years I have seen her interviews be monitored more. She would wear shameful costumes or jet -black sunglasses, intentionally a barrier between her and the journalist.

But the Gaga that I meet in New York is the same that I spoke to 16 years ago: comfortable with myself and full of enthusiasm.

She lays down that convenience on “growing up and leading a full life”.

“There are for my friends, there are for my family, my amazing fiancé – all these things made me a whole person, instead of the most important thing that was my theater character.”

With an atmosphere of finality, she adds: “I wanted Mayhem to have an end. I wanted the chaos to stop.

“I got away from the icon. It ends with love.”