Lady Gaga gets so "vulnerable" on her upcoming album 'Mayhem' that just speaking about it makes her want to "cry"
The 38-year-old pop superstar explained that she goes to a "very unsettling place" at the start of the deeply personal record, which makes it difficult to revisit in interviews
5 February 2025
Getting emotional, Gaga told ELLE in a new interview about her latest single, 'Abracadabra': "I'm trying not to cry talking to you because whenever I talk about my music, I want to cry. I'm definitely an overly raw person. Music strikes for me a chord that is deep in my body. And I think for some people, my music might do that for them too. Music brings us alive in a new way.
"My favourite thing about music is that a room can be feeling one way. And then you turn on a record and it's just like magic, the mood changes."
Asked if she feels vulnerable due to not playing a character in 'Mayhem' like previous albums, she agreed: "So yeah, I definitely think this album is very vulnerable. I'm not trying to play a character, the way that I did with Chromatica, with Joanne, with ARTPOP, there were all these characters. With Mayhem, they're all in there, but I'm the composer and it's for real."
Although she goes to a dark place at the start, the 'Die with a Smile' hitmaker explained that the ending reflects the "hopefulness" she found with her fiancé Michael Polansky during the process.
She added: "Overall, I would say that I have a special relationship with every single song on the record. Each one has its place on the album. And it really is an arc of a story that starts with something very unsettling and it ends in the kind of hopefulness that I found with my partner during making it. And now I get to keep going in this mayhem with somebody else. We're in it together."
There are some "angry" songs on there, too, making it a rollercoaster of emotions.
She said of the process and what she hopes her fans take away from it: "It was beautiful. It was fun. It was serious. I get very serious when I work. Some of the songs are angry. There's moments of humour and confidence. It's also about the mayhem for me of being a woman.
"I'm just feeling everything and going through it all. But the joy also resides in the very fact that I get to make music for a living.
"And then in the end, all of the things that I've been through and thinking 'I don't know how am I going to get this industrial sort of pseudo 2000s beat to go with this electro grunge sound, and how am I going to get this kind of Bowie funky record to mesh with this 80s synth pop....' I'm doing all this gymnastics. But the joy of it in the end is that I was able to make sense of it for me."
She continued: "I want people to have that feeling for themselves. They may not have that feeling for themselves with this record because it's not what they made. But I hope that they will see it as an expression of what's possible."
© 2025 Bang Showbiz, NZCity
