My biggest fear? Being alone

No one wants to be alone, and no work is more insulating than being a pop star.

Just ask Lady Gaga.

His ascent to glory in 2009-10 was different from everything we had seen before. One of the first pop stars to exploit the power of the Internet, it seemed to exist in a permanent attack of TMZ photos and gossip blogs.

Their appetite was voracious. She wore through so many looks and sounds in the space of three years that a critic wrote that she was “whole career of Madonna”.

And as its fame grew, the headlines have become more disturbed. She organized a satanic ritual in a London hotel … She was secretly a hermaphrodite … She planned to see her own leg “for fashion”.

When she attended the 2010 MTV Awards in a dress entirely in meat, nobody seemed to be the joke: Gaga presented herself as fodder for the tabloids, he consumed it.

On stage, she was an object of worship for her fans, the little monsters. But whoever is not Megalomaniac knows that this kind of adulation is a distant illusion.

“I am alone, Brandon. Each evening,” Gaga told his stylist in the 2017 documentary, Five Foot Two.

“I go from everyone who touches me all day and tell me all day in total silence.”

Now 38 years old, and with pleasure the technological entrepreneur Michael Polansky, Gaga admits that these years of loneliness have scared him.

“I think my biggest fear has been to do this by myself-to make life for myself,” she said to the BBC.

“And I think the biggest gift has been to meet my partner, Michael, and to be in chaos with him.”

The couple has been together since 2020 and revealed their commitment to Venice Film Festival last September – where Gaga wore his engagement ring to a million dollars in public for the first time.

In person, it is dazzling, with a huge oval cut diamond on a group of diamond pavement in white gold and 18 carat pink gold.

But on the other hand, Gaga has a smaller and more discreet ring, with a few grass blades located in resin. It turns out that This is the really special.

“Michael offered me with these grass blades,” she reveals.

“A long time ago, we were in the backyard, and he asked me:” If I never offered you, how can I do this? “”

“And I just said:” Just get a grass blade from the rear court and wrap it around my finger and it will make me so happy “.”

It was a deeply romantic gesture that was tinged with sadness. The Gaga backyard in Malibu had previously welcomed the wedding of her near friend, Sonja Durham, shortly before her death from cancer in 2017.

“There was so much loss, but this happy thing happened for me,” she recalls the proposal of Polansky.

“To give me up at 38 … I was thinking about what it took to do at this time.”

These feelings finally informed a song of his new album, Mayhem.

Called (naturally) grass blade, he finds the star singing on one “Kiss lovers in a garden made of thorns“, And the promise of love in a period of darkness.

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

Mayhem marks Gaga’s full return to pop, after a period when she had been concerned about her cinematographic career, and derivative albums that have tried jazz and the classic American song book.

Addressing Vogue last year, the singer revealed that it was her fiancé who had pushed her in this direction.

“He was like,” baby. I love you. You have to make pop music “,” She said.

“During the chromatica tour, I saw a fire in her,” added Polansky. “I wanted to help her keep this alive all the time and start making music that made her happy.”

With this approach, the album immediately returns to the sound of Sucker-Punch of Gaga’s first successes like Poker Face, Just Dance and Born in this way.

On the last single, Abracadabra, she even revisits the “Roma-ma-mail“Gibberrish of Bad Romance – although this time there is a reference to death, as she sings,”Morta-Ooh-Gaga“.

In the album’s work, his face is reflected in a broken mirror. In the videos, she clashes against the previous versions of herself.

There is an overwhelming feeling that the artist Stefani Germanotta has with the scene that she created.

Everything comes to the head on a song entitled Perfect Celebrity where she sings, “I became a notorious being“- A word which, like the meat dress before, eliminates its humanity.

“This is probably the most angry song on the fame I have ever written,” she said.

“I had created this public character whom I really became in all ways – and hold the duality of this, knowing where I start and that Lady Gaga ends, was really a challenge.

“It somehow killed me.”

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

“I think what I really achieved is that it is healthier for not Have a line of demarcation and integrate these two things into an entire human being, “she said.

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

“I am a lover of writing songs. I am a lover of music, rehearsal, choreography, scenic production, costumes, lighting, the show.

“This is what Lady Gaga means. He’s the artist behind everything.”

In previous interviews, the musician explained how she dissociated from Lady Gaga. For a while, she thought that the character was responsible for all his success, and she had contributed nothing.

Mayhem marks the moment when she recovers the property of her music, not only of “Lady Gaga” but other producers and writers of her orbit.

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

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

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

Last summer, after playing at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, she went down to the streets of Paris and played the first demos of his new music to fans who had gathered in front of his hotel.

It was a spur of the decision of the moment, but he marked another effort to restore the spontaneity of his beginning of a career.

“This is something I have done for almost 20 years, where I played my fans my music before its release,” she said.

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

“I am sure you can imagine that after 20 years, you do not expect people to always 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 are there.”

As an interviewer, it is also a full circle moment for me. I interviewed Lady Gaga for the last time In 2009As just the dance struck the number one in the United Kingdom.

At the time, she was stunned with an excitement, enthusiastically chatting about her love by John Lennon, calling herself a “heroine addict” for English tea and promising to send me a mp3 of blueberries – a new song which is, fairly brilliantly, to play a sexual act while your breathing feels the breath of coffee with a blueberry.

Over the years, I saw his interviews become more kept. She would wear scandalous costumes or black sunglasses, deliberately putting a barrier between her and the journalist.

But the Gaga that I meet in New York is the same to which I spoke 16 years ago: at ease with itself and overflowing with enthusiasm.

It puts this ease of “growing up and living a full life”.

“Being there for my friends, being there for my family, meeting my incredible fiancé – all these things made me a whole person, instead of the most important thing to be my stage personality.”

With an air of finality, she added: “I wanted chaos to have an end. I wanted chaos to stop.

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