Clearly, this is not the over-the-top Gaga of ARTPOP — and for now, at least, that’s probably a good thing. While that 2013 album ultimately sold 2.5 million copies worldwide, it received mixed reviews, and while Gaga’s diehard fans, or “Little Monsters,” were supportive, many journalists were incredibly unkind — almost willing her to fail, dubbing the album ARTFLOP, and downright gleefully reporting on even the most minor setback in her personal or professional life at the time. Gaga admits that this backlash was “hurtful at times… it doesn’t feel good when you put that much time and work and effort into things, and people make fun of them, or shame you for things you’ve created.” However, she adds: “The thing is, you’re not always going to make something that everybody likes. You can’t be in this for the business of people liking you. That would just not be even the right thing to do! To have such a big voice in the world and to only care about people liking you — what’s the point, really? When I’m making records, I’m never thinking, ‘How can I make this something that’s accepted?’” ARTPOP’s promotional cycle also included a series of preposterous and misunderstood stunts, like a South By Southwest showcase that featured Gaga getting covered in rainbow barf by “vomit artist” Millie Brown, or an equally controversial Oval Office-themed American Music Awards performance in which Gaga played a Monica Lewinsky-like role alongside a presidential R. Kelly. Back then, some naysayers believed Gaga had at long last jumped the proverbial shark. “You know, I do have to take responsibility that there’s an element of absurdity to a lot of what I’ve done in the past,” Gaga concedes. “The meat [dress] thing, and confusing people, that has been part of my thing. And I wouldn’t even say necessarily that now that’s entirely different. I think that people seeing me take everything off, it’s making them ask questions as well — but what I’m hoping for is for people to stop asking so many questions about ‘why?’ and just listen to the music.”

Gaga’s giggliness becomes noticeably more audible over the phone line the more she talks about Joanne’s special guests. She says of her Beck collaboration: “It’s a really fun dance song. It’s a great record. We started in Malibu. We were just hanging out for the afternoon and I asked him if he wanted to go into the live room, which is where all the instruments are for recording. And we just went in and I sat at the piano. I believe he was playing a Hummingbird guitar that Mark gave me, and we just sat down and started to jam and we wrote the song. It’s a killer, killer record.” Of Parker, she raves, “I couldn’t wait to work with him. That was love at first sight when we all got together.” Of Homme, she says, “He spent so much time with us on the guitars and working on so many of these records… He’s amazing. I was up for days with him, working. We had the best time. I could listen to him play guitar for hours and hours and hours. He’s just tremendous.” And she calls Ronson “a tremendously brilliant talent. My favorite thing about the work that we did together on the album is just the way that he inspired me when I was singing. The vocals on the record are very honest. I love the way that he hears my voice.” At this point in the conversation, Gaga gets so excited, she even starts reciting a few lines from her “Sinner’s Prayer” track with “fantastic poet” Father John Misty: “I’ve got a baby sister who looks just like me/And she wants nothing more than a man to please/Maybe she’s in too deep/Her love for him ain’t cheap/But it breaks just like a knockoff piece.” “Sinner’s Prayer” definitely sounds like a ladies’ anthem — for the young Joannes of the world, if you will — and Gaga says she “wanted to speak to a female audience… I’m excited that when I walk down the street now and people see me, that they don’t just see the outfit and can’t wait to take a picture. I can’t wait to lock eyes with that woman that says, ‘Thank you for writing Joanne.’ That’s my goal. I want to know that she heard me in a deeper place.” But Joanne, she stresses, is for everyone. “I really just want all those girls that have never really understood me before, or those boys that have never understood me before, to hear what I have to say about being me during this time in the world… I can try to speak to women, but I’m not trying to speak to these women in a way that they get all riled up and then they’re mad at their man. Or they’re mad at their girlfriend. Or they’re mad at their dad. You know? It’s the opposite. I want to speak to these women and I want the men sitting next to them to hear the songs and go, ‘Oh, I get it. I understand you now better, baby. I get you now, baby.’ Mark and I talked a lot about it: When speaking to women, when speaking to men, how could we make statements to women that men would understand and be a part of, and bring men and women closer, bring women closer?” One Joanne track — with a seemingly unlikely collaborator, country songwriter Hillary Lindsey (Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take the Wheel,” Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush”) — is an especially poignant “girls’ song” with universal appeal, and one tied to the overall, underlying theme of loss inspired by the album’s namesake. “’Grigio Girl’ is about me and my girlfriend getting together to drink Pinot grigio and cry without our friend Sonja [Dunham, Haus of Gaga’s managing director], because Sonja had cancer and we needed the time without her to cry about it, because we didn’t want to cry in front of her — because she was so strong, and she was keeping us so strong,” Gaga reveals, getting serious again. “It kind of started there, and then it turned into a song really about how girls get together to let it all go and pour our souls out. Then we started to play the song for guy friends — both gay and straight guys — and we just saw the look on their faces, like, ‘Oh, man, that’s so true. Now I get why my girl is like that.’ And then they were like, ‘Hey, why can’t I be a grigio girl, too?’ They want to be at the party, because the party is so inclusive. It’s a place where you can let it all out.”

Clearly, this is not the over-the-top Gaga of ARTPOP — and for now, at least, that’s probably a good thing. While that 2013 album ultimately sold 2.5 million copies worldwide, it received mixed reviews, and while Gaga’s diehard fans, or “Little Monsters,” were supportive, many journalists were incredibly unkind — almost willing her to fail, dubbing the album ARTFLOP, and downright gleefully reporting on even the most minor setback in her personal or professional life at the time.


She knows

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