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Near the end of my call with Lady Gaga, she turned the interview on me, asking about my own health in my current stage of life.
Our interview about the origins and influences behind her seventh studio album Mayhem, which was released on March 7th, had evolved into a two-way conversation about our personal mayhem informing our relationship with the subject matter. Though her subversive devotion to self-expression (manifested in a catalog of social and political statements throughout her career) and representation of the misunderstood misfits of the world have shaped my coming-of-age, it was always this quieter — albeit equally powerful — force beneath Lady Gaga’s shapeshifting spectacle that had spoken to me most deeply over the years.
Beneath her lyrical wizardry and theatrical sprawl, I’ve read and felt something less palpable unfolding throughout her discography: a narrative about her own personal battles for health and happiness — one that, though singular to her own experiences, has resonated with many of her Little Monsters in its inarticulable and disorienting loneliness. Our conversation was an intimate one to have shared with a stranger, but it poignantly revealed the heart of Lady Gaga’s new work: an acceptance and reclamation of all these parts, including the ones that have suffered to stay afloat beneath the confident and strong-willed visage she shares with the public eye.
“I arrived at Mayhem musically, creatively, conceptually by accepting my past,” Gaga tells Teen Vogue, “and allowing myself not to live in shame of it, rather to live in the glory that I’m still here.”
From Club Mayhem in LA and her NYC-based Spotify listening party to countless nights re-watching her SNL performances, celebrating at Mayhem raves, and tripping over the “Abracadabra” choreography in my kitchen, my last two weeks since the album release have been sheer mayhem. But the album has re-ignited Gaga’s heyday beyond my own circles: it debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200, topping the charts in 21 countries; achieved 45.7 million global streams on Spotify in its first day, becoming Gaga's highest debut on the platform for an album; and outsold the top 10 best-selling albums in the country combined. The already Grammy-winning collaboration with Bruno Mars "Die With A Smile" became the first song in history to spend a milestone 150 days at no. 1 on the global Spotify chart. Critics are hailing the album as one of her most transformative works, with Rolling Stone calling it a “musical masterpiece,” Pitchfork praising its “genre-defying audacity.”
“It's been such an amazing couple of months, and this past week was just…” Gaga trails off. “I'm hugely grateful for it. It was such a dream. We've been working really, really hard.”
Fans and critics alike have declared that Gaga is back. Sure, much of the album reawakens the voice, ethos, and nonsensical but infectious neologies of her so-called “glory days.” She channels the girlish voice of her The Fame (2008) era, “t-t-t-t-t-take you to the Garden of Eden” echoing the trademark sound and syncopation of “p-p-p-poker face.” The album’s lead singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra” revive the ghoulish fun of The Fame Monster and Born This Way, Abracadabra’s “abra-oh-na-na, morta-oh-ga-ga”” winking to “Bad Romance”’s iconic chorus, its choreography even topping the intensity of “Judas” and “Telephone.” The 14-track collection also marries these eras lyrically: “Zombieboy,” for instance, a disco number that pays tribute to her late friend Rick Genest, the skeleton from the “Born This Way” music video, reminisces upon the mornings they shared after too wild of a night out, now galvanizing fan choreography that even Gaga has taken to on social media.
But callbacks to past selves extend beyond her 2000s hits, reinterpreting every chapter of her expansive oeuvre. Unreleased songs from her back catalogue such as “Princess Die” or imagery from the Harlequin (2024) album cover resurface in lyrics. In one of my favorite numbers “Vanish Into You,” Gaga merges her cabaret piano prowess — which was especially exhibited at her Vegas Jazz & Piano residency — with a soaring operatic break, mirroring the structure of “Bad Romance.”
The angry electro-grunge “Perfect Celebrity,” which Gaga revealed was one of the most vulnerable tracks on the record and was also the working album title, critiques her insidious hunger for fame that paved her career. She opens the corrosive number with “I’m made of plastic like a human doll,” an easter egg to Chromatica's “Plastic Doll.” Additionally, in the electro-funk number “Killah” featuring Gessafelstein, she sings with a Prince-esque hypnotic groove from the perspective of a night club’s femme fatale, murdering men and sticking cigarettes into their eyes, while dressed in a maximalist Artpop-esque ensemble for her campy SNL performance. On Mayhem, she draws from her own artistic lineage, propelling into its evolving future, but the hard-fought path to get there is more complicated than that.
To some Monsters, the most resonant journey within Gaga’s evolving lexicon are her ongoing war with mental illness and personal health issues. The Fame Monster (2009)’s “Dance in the Dark” explores body dysmorphia; Born This Way’s “Marry the Night” embraces reckless partying as a form of escapism; and the ballad “Till It Happens to You” written for The Hunting Ground addresses the PTSD of sexual assault.
“I would say that my mental health always played a really powerful role in making music,” Gaga says. “Because it was always when I was at my lowest that I wanted to sing. And that meant that I was feeling that way pretty often, because I sang a lot. I would write music and sing from a place of feeling lost, and it would help me ground myself and find my own voice to tell my story.”
Lady Gaga’s sixth studio album Chromatica (2020) delves deepest into her life with chronic pain, in particular. “I knew my health was really suffering during my career when I didn't want to make music. Because it almost went too far beyond that it silenced me, the amount of depression and fear that I felt,” she says.
Cody Adkins, a longtime Little Monster and holistic therapist living with multiple sclerosis, who I met in person for the first time at Club Mayhem last week, noted that “911” — a synth-pop number excavating Gaga’s experience with antipsychotics for chronic pain and PTSD — aptly captures the disorientation of living with an invisible illness, especially as a young person.
“It's been like a snowflake disease. I've experienced so many different symptoms from optic neuritis, where I went almost blind in my left eye, to not being able to walk. The unpredictability and the fatigue make something as simple as standing up and cleaning the house impossible,” Adkins says. “Living with MS in my early thirties is like carrying a weight that no one but me can see. No one understands how it feels when my body that I fight so hard to feel safe in continuously betrays me.”
Managing advisor at Parsons School of Design Roy Cohen, who I first met at Ty Sunderland’s annual Gaga boat party as a fellow NYC Gaga-event regular, agrees, “What Gaga conveys makes me feel seen because people do not tend to qualify your pain as legitimate because it is ‘invisible.’”
My favorite song, Chromatica’s “Fun Tonight,” feels especially evocative of this experience, as she sings to a past version of herself — her public version who she had worked so hard to become, who “loves the paparazzi/loves the fame/ even though it causes me pain” — while she is bedridden at home alone one night. “I feel like I’m in a prison hell/ stick my hands through the steel bars and yell,” the lyrics go, conveying the isolation, entrapment, and war with herself, regardless of how resilient or vibrant her exterior may be.
“Gaga conveys the unpretty and vulnerable side of trying to figure it out while facing her own suffering and trauma,” fashion designer Xtian de Medici, who created the extraterrestrial mask that concealed her face before this song during the Chromatica Ball in 2022, tells me. “I think everybody grapples with this duality in their own way.”
I think frequently about the way she performed “Fun Tonight” in Hershey Park during the Ball, sharing that friends would urge her to create music with them, but she’d be in too much pain. As she revisited these times when even her closest friends failed to empathize, her struggle to merely stay afloat — let alone continue creating — hit me to my core. For many, the song captures one of the loneliest aspects of chronic illness — the longing for the person you once were, but can no longer access; the grief of feeling like you must say goodbye to the past versions of yourself you wish you could still be.
It calls into question who her art and fame are for, blurring the binary between internal and external perceptions of her identity. In the song, Gaga glorifies and aspires toward her outer self, but she also resents this side of herself that she is struggling to live up to. “I really relate to your feeling listening to that song,” she tells me. “I just feel like that's who I made the song for. I feel like you have to know that experience to really get the song.”
When I reflect upon some of these most resonant memories of Gaga on stage, it strangely hurts to hear so much praise around Gaga’s “comeback.” To me, the buzz almost misses the point of Mayhem, which hinges upon this reclaiming ownership over all the parts that complete her today — pop and classical, internal and external, happy and sad, health and struggle. The takeaway of the album is not about the nostalgia and virality of her “Abracadabra” choreography, but the battles she has waged to be able to dance again at all. When she shared that it took extensive training and healing to return to dance after years hindered by intense nerve pain, her ultimatum at the beginning of the music video — to “dance or die” — took on all the more meaning.
“When I first started to heal physically for the first time in ten years, I knew it was possible, and then I really focused on taking care of my health for all parts of who I am,” she tells Teen Vogue. “It’s no longer just about one side of me. It’s about valuing myself as a member of my family, and valuing myself as a girlfriend and fiancé, valuing myself as a sister, a daughter, a friend, and allowing music to be a part of that, but not all of it. I think it helped me find a sense of self that created some deep healing.”
In my conversations with other Little Monsters about what they have learned from the album, Brooklyn-based ceramicist Max Chen shares, “Mayhem is a declaration that identity isn’t about fitting into a single mold. It’s about embracing every contradiction.” Another Little Monster, psychiatry student Keegan Campbell adds, “This album in particular has inspired me to look back on who I’ve been over the years. Mayhem gives me the extra strength to keep pushing forward no matter what obstacles stand in my way whether they’re mentally, physically or emotionally.”
As she enters the demanding show schedule of her Mayhem era — and personally, marriage and motherhood — she brings with her Mayhem’s lessons. “Though I do still have flareups and my moments, it's much more under control. I live a lot more balanced, and I don't live so fast anymore,” she says. “I think living fast took its toll on me. I really try to take care of myself, and I put my health as far forward as I can.”
I was surprised and strangely moved by the peacefulness and warmth in her voice, as the girl whose schedule of “no sleep, bus, club, another club, another club, plane, next place, no sleep, no fear” has turned that discipline and passion toward herself with newfound clarity and agency. “I think the biggest message that I learned from Mayhem is that the chaos can have an ending, and Mayhem can end,” Gaga says. “But, ultimately, you have to be willing for it to be that way. You have to be open to change to write a new era in your life. Don’t be afraid to take time for yourself when you need it.”
To me and many monsters, the most beautiful part of Mayhem is how it grows from all that came before. In the “Disease” music video, Gaga confronts different versions of herself — they attack, chase, and attempt to escape one another to no avail as walls close around her, these scenes memorialized in my drawings on my bedroom walls. The film is mildly grotesque and disturbing, as one Gaga bleeds in agony and another consumes her blood before they hold hands and conjoin into one. At the end, her core self surrenders to the closing walls. “I can cure your disease,” she sings, reminding me of one of her 2023 Vegas performances of “Bad Romance,” in which, before she sang “I want your disease,” she shared that the toxic relationship is with herself. Ultimately, the song is a challenge to herself to confront the parts she has feared and resented, to accept that the only way forward is to nurture not only the Gaga we see, but all the parts that hurt yet make her complete.
“The Mayhem is all the pieces that make me who I am,” she tells me. “I can dive back into it through all my different dreams, all my dark dreams, and I can relive it whenever I want, I can rewrite it to make it beautiful.”
