‎Harlequin – Album by Girl Gaga

In the summertime of 2023, Girl Gaga started dropping hints a few mysterious mission she’d been engaged on in secret—new music, so she claimed, that sounded nothing like her previous work. Followers questioned whether or not it may very well be “LG7,” the long-awaited follow-up to 2020’s Chromatica, till September 2024, when billboards popped up with the message “LG6.5.” The shock between the pop auteur’s sixth and seventh studio albums seems to be Harlequin, an idea album delivered from the warped perspective of Lee Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, her character in Todd Phillips’ Joker-fied jukebox musical Joker: Folie à Deux.

As is usually the case for actors who quickly inhabit Gotham Metropolis, Gaga realized shortly after filming wrapped that she hadn’t but moved on from the character she’d been embodying. She started to conceptualize an album of up to date jazz requirements sung because the Joker’s foremost squeeze. Harlequin, recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu alongside LG7, works as a companion piece to the movie, nevertheless it’s additionally distinctly aligned with Gaga’s singular imaginative and prescient.

First, although, Gaga developed Lee’s singing potential for the function. “I did a whole lot of totally different varieties of labor to create her,” she advised Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “One of many issues that I did was change my voice within the movie. It’s Lee’s voice, and it’s actually uncooked, and it’s actually bare. It’s very untrained. Not correct respiratory.” How did the celebrity with the powerhouse vocals obtain this? “I believe that Joaquin [Phoenix] scared the residing shit out of me day by day till my voice left my physique.”

Who else might pull off a reimagining of the 1932 basic “I’ve Received the World on a String” as a gritty surf-rock slow-burner (“What if The Cramps made a French track?”) or ship a track from an obscure 1964 musical as an ’80s rock ripper? That track, “The Joker,” originates from The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Odor of the Crowd, although it might have been written precisely for Gaga to sing proper now—as might the 1952 customary “That’s Leisure,” popularized by Judy Garland: “All the pieces that occurs in life can occur in a present/You may make ’em giggle, you can also make ’em cry/Something can go!” However hear carefully and also you’ll hear Gaga’s subtly twisted tweaks: the cheery lyrics of “Good Morning” by means of Singin’ within the Rain (“Good morning/Rainbows are shining via!”) are changed with the gleefully sinister “Bang bang, you’re black and blue!”

Contemplating her skilled and private relationship with the late Tony Bennett and her personal jazz residency in Vegas, Gaga could be very intimate with the style. But she realizes that Bennett most likely wouldn’t have accepted of her tackle the songs this time round: “We did a lot that Tony would by no means have been cool with.” The Oscar winner additionally delves into the psychology of the album’s authentic lower “Completely satisfied Mistake.” “When girls play these damaged characters in music or in movies or theater, the viewers loves it, they usually simply cheer us on,” she mentioned. “They cheer on the picture of ache. It’s tremendous complicated. That track is in a whole lot of methods about that.”