Lady Gaga felt Tony Bennett 'in our hearts' making “Joker-”inspired album: 'He would’ve been really proud

"When Tony passed away, when we found out, we were in our kitchen. The minute it happened, I looked around and realized his art was all around us," Gaga tells EW.

Lady Gaga experiments with clanging trash can lids, thundering war drums, and daring alterations to lyrics of American pop standards on her new Joker-inspired album Harlequin; the thread tying it all together, though, are her roots in jazz music, and she tells Entertainment Weekly she felt her late, longtime genre collaborator Tony Bennett in every note along the way.

Gaga explains that she made Harlequin as both an eclectic exploration of her own creative expression through music, and as an ode to Harley Quinn, the famed DC Comics character she plays opposite Joaquin Phoenix's Joker in the upcoming sequel Joker: Folie à Deux. Either way, she made the album "with Tony in our hearts," she says of her work with collaborators including her fiancé, Michael Polansky, and musicians Benjamin Rice, Brian Newman, and more.

"Tony worked with a lot of those musicians, and he celebrated young musicians," explains Gaga of the album, which contains mostly covers of old-school songs, repurposed from how they're performed on screen (many in duet style with Phoenix) in Joker: Folie à Deux's musical numbers. "The thing that lingered the most is that, when Tony was young, singing this music, this was just pop music. This wasn’t considered jazz in a genre, in the corner that wasn’t included in the popular conversation. In Tony’s spirit, I wanted to create something that celebrated vintage pop that’s entirely modern and new."

For example, she cites, "I wanted to do things production-wise that maybe I never would’ve done with Tony and push myself," and, as a result, she thinks "he would’ve been really proud" of the resulting work. "This was my first foray into musical production with jazz, and I think he would’ve been so excited to see it," she says.

Gaga also opens up about the moment she learned that Bennett — with whom she first worked on a cover of "The Lady Is a Tramp" on his 2011 Duets II album — died in 2023 at age 96 following a lengthy battle with Alzheimer's.

Related: A tribute to Lady Gaga's love for Tony Bennett, her biggest Little Monster

"When Tony passed away, when we found out, we were in our kitchen. The minute it happened, I looked around and I realized that his art was all around us, because Tony was also a fine artist, and he did beautiful paintings and sketches," Gaga says. "I knew instantly that he would be such a huge part of our lives forever."

Such artwork can be seen throughout the packaging for their final album together, 2021's Love for Sale, a collection of Cole Porter covers. Love for Sale marked the second collaborative album Bennett and Gaga made together, following 2014's Cheek to Cheek.

Related: Lady Gaga says 'playing a persona had a price,' confronts her pain from early fame on new Joker album Harlequin

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Bennett's 2023 death followed a multi-year battle with Alzheimer's, which he was first diagnosed with in 2016. In an interview with AARP, Bennett's wife, Susan, revealed that music was a healing entity along the journey.

"There's a lot about him that I miss," Susan said at the end of the piece. "Because he's not the old Tony anymore. But when he sings, he's the old Tony."

Gaga celebrated her work with Bennett in the televised CBS special One Last Time, which documented the pair's final concert together in New York City, where Gaga emotionally escorted the jazz legend off stage for the last time in his career, to uproarious applause.

Harlequin is out now. Joker: Folie à Deux is in theaters Friday, Oct. 4.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.