My biggest fear? Being alone

No-one wants to be alone, and no job is more isolating than being a pop star.

Just ask Lady Gaga.

Her rise to fame in 2009-10 was unlike anything we’d seen before. One of the first pop stars to harness the power of the internet, she seemed to exist in a permanent onslaught of TMZ photos and gossip blogs.

Their appetite was voracious. She wore through so many looks and sounds in the space of three years that one critic wrote she was “speed-running Madonna’s entire career”.

And as her fame grew, the headlines became more unhinged. She staged a satanic ritual in a London hotel… She was secretly a hermaphrodite… She planned to saw her own leg off “for fashion”.

When she attended the 2010 MTV Awards in a dress made entirely of meat, nobody seemed to get the joke: Gaga was presenting herself as fodder for the tabloids, there to be consumed.

On stage, she was an object of worship for her fans, the Little Monsters. But anyone who isn’t a megalomaniac knows that that sort of adulation is a distant illusion.

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

“I go from everyone touching me all day and talking at me all day to total silence.”

Now 38, and happily engaged to tech entrepreneur Michael Polansky, Gaga admits that those years of solitude scared her.

“I think my biggest fear was doing this by myself – doing life on my own,” she tells the BBC.

“And I think that the greatest gift has been meeting my partner, Michael, and being in the mayhem with him.”

The couple have been together since 2020, and revealed their engagement at the Venice Film Festival last September – where Gaga wore her million-dollar engagement ring in public for the first time.

In person, it’s dazzling, with a huge, oval-cut diamond set on a 18-karat white and rose gold diamond pavé band.

But on her other hand, Gaga sports a smaller, more understated ring, featuring a few blades of grass set in resin. It turns out that this is the really special one.

“Michael actually proposed to me with these blades of grass,” she reveals.

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

“And I just said, ‘Just get a blade of grass from the back yard and wrap it around my finger and that will make me so happy’.”

It was a deeply romantic gesture that came tinged with sadness. Gaga’s back yard in Malibu had previously played host to the wedding of her close friend, Sonja Durham, shortly before she died of cancer in 2017.

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

“To get engaged at 38… I was thinking about what it took to get to this moment.”

Those feelings ultimately informed a song on her new album, Mayhem.

Called (naturally) Blade of Grass, it finds the star singing about a “lovers’ kiss in a garden made of thorns“, and the promise of love in a time of darkness.

She calls it a “thank you” to her partner. And fans might have a reason to thank him, too.

Mayhem marks Gaga’s full throttle return to pop, after a period where she’d been preoccupied with her film career, and spin-off albums that dabbled in jazz and the classic American songbook.

Speaking to Vogue last year, the singer revealed it was her fiancé who’d nudged her in that direction.

“He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music’,” she said.

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

With that approach, the album goes right back to the sucker-punch sound of Gaga’s early hits like Poker Face, Just Dance and Born This Way.

On the latest single, Abracadabra, she even revisits the “roma-ma-ma” gibberish of Bad Romance – although this time there’s a reference to death, as she sings, “morta-ooh-Gaga“.

In the album’s artwork, her face is reflected in a broken mirror. In the videos, she squares off against earlier versions of herself.

There’s an overwhelming sense that the artist Stefani Germanotta is reckoning with the stage persona she created.

It all comes to a head on a track called Perfect Celebrity where she sings, “I became a notorious being” – a lyric that, like the meat dress before it, strips away her humanity.

“That’s probably the most angry song about fame I’ve ever written,” she says.

“I’d created this public persona that I was truly becoming in every way – and holding the duality of that, knowing where I begin and Lady Gaga ends, was really a challenge.

“It kind of took me down.”

How did she reconcile the public and private sides of her life?

“I think what I actually realised is that it’s healthier to not have a dividing line and to integrate those two things into one whole human being,” she says.

“The healthiest thing for me was owning that I’m a female artist and that living an artistic life was my choice.

“I am a lover of songwriting. I’m a lover of making music, of rehearsing, choreography, stage production, costumes, lighting, putting on a show.

“That is what it means to be Lady Gaga. It’s the artist behind it all.”

In previous interviews, the musician has spoken of how she dissociated from Lady Gaga. For a time, she believed the character was responsible for all her success, and she had contributed nothing.

Mayhem marks the moment where she reclaims ownership of her music, not just from “Lady Gaga” but from other producers and writers in her orbit.

“When I was younger, people tried take credit for my sound, or my image [but] all of my references, all of my imagination of what pop music could be, came from me.

“So I really wanted to revisit my earlier inspirations and my career and own it as my invention, for once and for all.”

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

Last summer, after performing at the Olympics opening ceremony, she took to the streets of Paris and played early demos of her new music to fans who’d gathered outside her hotel.

It was a spur of the moment decision, yet it marked another effort to restore the spontaneity of her early career.

“This has been something I’ve done for almost 20 years, where I played my fans my music way before it came out,” she says.

“I used to, after my shows, invite fans backstage, and we’d hang out and I’d play them demos and see what they thought of the music.

“I’m sure you can imagine that after 20 years, you don’t expect that people are still going to show up to hear 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-circle moment for me, too. I last interviewed Lady Gaga in 2009, as Just Dance hit number one in the UK.

Back then, she was giddy with excitement, chatting enthusiastically about her love of John Lennon, calling herself a “heroin addict” for English tea, and promising to email me an MP3 of Blueberry Kisses – an unreleased song that is, quite brilliantly, about performing a sex act while your breath smells of blueberry flavoured coffee.

Over the years, I’ve seen her interviews become more guarded. She’d wear outrageous costumes or jet-black sunglasses, deliberately putting a barrier between her and the journalist.

But the Gaga I meet in New York is the same one I spoke to 16 years ago: comfortable with herself, and brimming with enthusiasm.

She puts that ease down to “growing up and living a full life”.

“Being there for my friends, being there for my family, meeting my amazing fiancé – all of these things made me a whole person, instead of the most important thing being my stage persona.”

With an air of finality, she adds: “I wanted Mayhem to have an ending. I wanted the chaos to stop.

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