My biggest fear? Be alone

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

Just ask Lady Gaga.

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

His appetite was voracious. He wore so many looks and sounds in the three -year space that a critic wrote that it was “Madonna’s career.”

And as their fame grew, the headlines became more deranged. She organized a satanic ritual at a London hotel … It was secretly a hermaphrodite … she planned to see her own leg “for fashion.”

When he attended the 2010 MTV awards with a completely made meat dress, no one seemed to get the joke: Gaga was presented as fodder for the tabloides, there will be consumed.

On stage, she was an object of worship for her fans, the little monsters. But anyone who is not a megalomaniac knows that this type of adulation is a distant illusion.

“I’m alone, Brandon. Every night,” Gaga told his stylist in the 2017 documentary, Five Foot Two.

“I spend all the day and talking to me all day to total silence.”

Now 38 years old, and happily committed to the technological businessman Michael Polansky, Gaga admits that those years of solitude scared her.

“I think my greatest fear was doing this alone: ​​making life on my own,” he tells BBC.

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

The couple has been together since 2020 and revealed their commitment at the Venice Film Festival last September, where Gaga used their commitment ring of one million dollars in public for the first time.

In person, it is dazzling, with a huge oval felling diamond in a band of white diamonds and 18 carat pink gold.

But on the other hand, Gaga looks a smaller and more discreet ring, with some grass blades in resin. It turns out that this It is really special.

“Michael actually proposed marriage to these grass blades,” he reveals.

“A long time ago, we were in the backyard, and he asked me: ‘If you ever proposed, how do I do that?’

“And I just said: ‘Simply get a back blade of the backyard and wrap her around my finger and that will make me very happy.”

It was a deeply romantic gesture that came dyed with sadness. Gaga’s backyard in Malibu had been hosting his close friend’s wedding, Sonja Durham, shortly before he died of cancer in 2017.

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

“To commit to the age of 38 … I was thinking about what was needed to get to this moment.”

Those feelings finally reported a song about their new album, Mayhem.

Call (naturally) grass sword, find the star singing about a “kiss of lovers in a garden made of thorns“, And the promise of love in a moment of darkness.

She calls her “thanks” to her partner. And fans could also have a reason to thank him.

Mayhem marks the return of Gaga’s full accelerator to Pop, after a period in which he had been concerned about his film career, and Spin-off albums that ventured into jazz and the classic American songbook.

Speaking to Vogue last year, the singer revealed that it was his fiance who had pushed her in that direction.

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

“On the Chromatica tour, I saw a fire in it,” Polansky added. “I wanted to help her alive all the time and start making music that made her happy.”

With that approach, the album returns to the sound of Gaga’s first successes as the first successes such as Poker Face, Just Dance and Born This Way.

In the last single, Abracadabra, he even visits the “Rome-ma“Giberish of Bad Romance, although this time there is a reference to death, while sings”,Morta -oo -Gaga“

In the album’s art work, his face is reflected in a broken mirror. In the videos, he faces previous versions of herself.

There is an overwhelming feeling that the artist Stefani Germanotta calculates with the personality of the stage he created.

Everything comes to a head in a song called Perfect Celebrity where it sings “,I became a notorious being” – A letter that, like the meat dress before him, eliminates his humanity.

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

“I had created this public personality in which I was really becoming every way, and sustaining the duality of that, knowing where I start and Lady Gaga ends, it was really a challenge.

“He knocked me somehow.”

How did you reconcile the public and deprived sides of your life?

“I think what I really realized is that it is healthier No Having a dividing line and integrating those two things into an entire human being, “she says.

“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 song composition. I am a lover of making music, essays, choreography, scenic production, costumes, lighting, organizing a show.

“That is what Lady Gaga means. He is the artist behind everything.”

In previous interviews, the musician has talked about how he dissociated Lady Gaga. For a while, he believed that the character was responsible for all his success, and had not contributed anything.

Mayhem marks the moment when he claims the property of his music, not only of “Lady Gaga” but of other producers and writers in his orbit.

“When I was younger, people tried to attribute 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 visit my previous inspirations and my career and own my invention, once and for all.”

From the beginning, it was obvious that Gaga was excited about this new phase.

Last summer, after acting at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, he took to the streets of Paris and He played early demonstrations of his new music to fans who had gathered outside their hotel.

It was a decision of the moment, but marked another effort to restore the spontaneity of his 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, after my shows, invite fans in the backstage, and we would pass the time and play demonstrations and see what they thought of music.

“I am sure you can imagine that after 20 years, you don’t expect people to still show up to listen to 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 a full time for me too. The last time I interviewed Lady Gaga in 2009As only dance came to number one in the United Kingdom.

At that time, she was stunned with emotion, chatting with enthusiasm about her love for John Lennon, calling herself as a “heroin addict” for English tea and promising to send me an email of an MP3 of Blueberry Kisses, an unprecedented song that is, quite brightly, on a sexual act while his breath smells like a coffee with a blue -flavored coffee.

Over the years, I have seen that their interviews are more monitored. I would wear scandalous suits or black sunglasses in Jet, deliberately putting a barrier between her and the journalist.

But the Gaga that I know in New York is the same with which I spoke 16 years ago: comfortable with himself and full of enthusiasm.

She deposits that ease of “growing and living a full life.”

“Being there for my friends, being there for my family, knowing my incredible promised one, all these things made me a complete person, instead of the most important as my stage personality.”

With an air purpose, he adds: “I wanted Mayhem to have an end. I wanted chaos to stop.

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