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

"Playing a strung-out girl my whole career was a way for me to split off from my true self," Gaga tells EW of the foundation for her genre-defying new album inspired by "Joker: Folie à Deux."

Shortly after she rose to international stardom with hits including "Just Dance" and "Poker Face," Lady Gaga — the pop star behind her 2008 breakout album The Fame — famously once told the world straight to its face that, well, the fame monster lurked right around the corner.

That meteoric rise took an emotional and psychological toll on the now-38-year-old icon, and she tells Entertainment Weekly she's been working it out ever since in the best way she knows how: through music, of course.

Inspired by both the lingering pain of early fame and her in-depth preparation to portray DC Comics villainess Harley Quinn opposite Joaquin Phoenix's Joker in director Todd Phillips' upcoming blockbuster sequel Joker: Folie à Deux, Gaga's new album Harlequin is a genre-bending, category-defining jaunt through covers and original tunes, from jazz and blues to funk and punk in between. It's a "wild and vibrant" sampling not only of musical history, she says, but also a career-spanning comment on the multiple personalities Gaga herself has taken on over the years.

"I was moved by the fact that there was this mentioning of psychosis that would be related to my character, Lee, so in the music, it was important to me that I addressed what it means to descend into fantasy in your life," Gaga says, pointing to both the film's subtitle (translation: "madness for two") and one of Harlequin's original compositions, a haunting ballad titled "Happy Mistake." The song, she says, reflects "the way I’ve split off into personalities throughout my career." To name just a few, Gaga has been a hard-rocking goddess birthing slimy spheres on Born This Way, a celestial alien raver during the Artpop era, and even a sonic medium on Joanne, a country-influenced ode to her aunt's death.

Related: Joker: Folie à Deux star Joaquin Phoenix was 'sick every day' over nailing twisted live songs with Lady Gaga, director says

Now, as she prepares to hit the big screen as Lee, the love interest of Phoenix's Joker who initially bonds with him over her affinity for the heinous murders as outlined in the first film, she wrote the tune "Happy Mistake" as an acceptance of similarly brutal slices of her public life. As she sings about "portraits of a strung-out girl" on the track, it registers as a knowing line for the performer, who — in contrast to the emotional strain she put herself through while playing real-life murderess Patrizia Reggiani in House of Gucci — has (perhaps more healthily) channeled her frustrations into a different side of her creative self on Harlequin.

"Playing a strung-out girl my whole career was a way for me to split off from my true self, but, it’s all me," she says. "Basically, that song says if I was ever going to find joy or happiness in my life, it would probably feel like an accident. Where I was in my life for a long time, I was on a path that was pretty futile because I was so split off from reality. My dedicated fans know this about me, that playing a persona had a price, and it has a price for Lee and her love of Joker. There’s definitely a way that I address that on this record."

This is hardly the first time Gaga has referenced her resistance to the trappings of fame. On tracks such as "Plastic Doll," "Fun Tonight," and "911" (which highlighted her subsequent treatment with antipsychotic medication), the 2020 LP Chromatica engaged with the trauma and anxiety that exposure caused Gaga via familiar, glitter-crusted sounds of pop escapism; Harlequin, however, harnesses a far more confrontational sound and marks the first time Gaga has attempted to splatter her guts in such experimental fashion across time-tested pop standards — many of which appear as musical sequences and duets (though not quite the same, here) in Joker: Folie à Deux.

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“We played a lot with genre, through the production of the music, the choices, the lyric changes, the approach to songs in the great American lexicon," Gaga explains of the tracklist. Also present are bold instrumental choices, such as clanging trash can lids and war drums.

Such changes, she points out, include her and co-producer (and fiancé) Michael Polansky peppering Joker's influence on Lee throughout small — yet pointed — alterations to classic tunes.

“I think they’re all risky. Some of these songs, like [Judy Garland's] ‘Get Happy,’ are from the 1930s. We’re in 2024, the song is nearly 100 years old. We focused on deploying slapstick and lyrical changes in reference to Arthur [Fleck]. He made his way into the album as well," she says, invoking the real name of Phoenix's Joker. "The lyric, ‘If a nice guy can lose, what’s it matter if you win?’ — that’s pretty daring, considering who Arthur is, what he’s done, and it’s something the film grapples with. We’re rooting for Arthur, and yet he killed five people. That lyric change on ‘Get Happy’ creates a context that I think is super interesting and makes the song more manic and celebratory in the spirit of the contrast and tension of the circumstances in the movie."

She adds: "The most daring is on [Shirley Bassey's] ‘The Joker.’ Michael and I wanted to show the defiance of Lee proclaiming that she is the real criminal in all of this, and that she has the ability to mastermind a kind of coup d'etat in their relationship, that she is the persona of Joker incarnate, in a woman."

There's a defiance, too, in the way Harlequin is packaged with Easter eggs highlighting moments from a career that has, in addition to the difficulties, brought the performer immense joy as well. Sprinkled throughout the front and back of the album's vinyl cover artwork, which shows Gaga luxuriating amid a room in utter chaos, there's a smashed VHS tape on the floor bearing the title "Joanne World Tour," as a nod to the concert series she had to cut short in 2018 due to severe pain; there's also the disco ball bra she wore in the "Just Dance" music video hanging on a lamp in the background, and an image of Tony Bennett — her longtime jazz collaborator who died in 2023 — on a TV screen at the back of the room.

She says Harlequin, containing her first solo jazz recordings without her Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale partner, was made "with Tony in our hearts," and estimates "he would’ve been really proud" of her unconventional take on the genre that she feels pushes "vintage pop" forward into an un-categorizable territory, much like it conjures Lee's "complexity of a woman that has danger within her and also bore a sense of sweetness and couldn’t be defined."

As Lee keeps Joker guessing throughout Folie à Deux, this phase of Gaga's career sparks questions about where she might be headed next as she elaborates on the lore of Harlequin, and which patch of the character's scarlet-hued quilt might be sewn into the fabric of her career next.

Gaga has been hard at work on her next proper pop album, which is set for release in February 2025. Fans have affectionately dubbed it LG7 in place of an official title, and many have pointed to Gaga's usage of spooky emojis (from a monster to vampires and aliens) as well as her recent assertion at a jazz show in Vegas that she's about to go "to hell" as indications that The Fame Monster-era Darkga might be back in rotation.

Related: Lady Gaga responds to college peers' viral Facebook group predicting she'd never be famous: 'You can't give up'

"I want all the music to be a surprise, as much as I can. I know that, in some ways, you all hate that," she says, laughing (she also declines to answer whether the long-awaited "Telephone" sequel featuring Beyoncé is on LG7 or not). "The darkness has already started to make its way into this record. Joker is a very dark film, but it has a lot of vibrancy and colorful moments to contrast it. It’s got its own particular brand of chaos in that way, but we already started to bring the darkness into Harlequin, through the use of guitar and some of the drum sounds, the grooves, some of the tones and the pedals that we used, even with the vocals, it has this unique quality where I always wanted it to feel like whatever room Harlequin was in while she was singing, you get the feeling that it was complicated."

It's clear that, as Gaga elaborates further, the line between herself and Harlequin — both as an imagined character and an album — blurs, even for the woman who created them both. One gets the sense that she's talking about both at the same time, when she reveals that, while the character "kind of lives in the darkness, she’s also happy, and there’s something kind of creepy and scary about that."

"But, that’s what I found in her: this girl, laying in her dirty bedroom with a huge grin on her face," she says. Whether she's referencing a similar scene that played out in the music video for her 2011 song "Marry the Night" (a reflection on her tooth-and-nail fight for stardom), we'll never know. But, as Gaga rides Lee into the next phase of her career, the trappings of fame that Harlequin burns will likely light the way.

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

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.