Jan 25, 2025

Lady Gaga Covers ELLE UK & ELLE U.S. Magazine

Lady Gaga Covers ELLE UK & ELLE U.S. Magazine

Lady Gaga covers the February 2025 issue of Elle magazine US and will cover the UK cover of March 2025. Her highly anticipated new album ''Meyham'' channels pure musical chaos, But at home with fiancé Michael Polansky, Mother Monster has found a new sense of calm and normalcy.


Here’s the thing: Lady Gaga doesn’t want to talk about herself. She will, because that’s what’s been asked of her throughout a 20-year-long career spanning music (13 Grammys), film (four Oscar nominations, one win), television (four Emmy nominations), fashion (where to start!), and her very own beauty range (Haus Labs). And she’ll answer my questions with a disarming vulnerability and level of self-reflection. But, she admits toward the end of our afternoon together at her record label in London, “I can’t tell you how much I wanted to ask you questions, too, this whole time. You have no idea how unnatural it is to meet someone and not be able to ask them about themselves. I don’t want to ruin the interview time for you, but I also want to give to people who give to me.”

 
  

And it’s this that I find so surprising about meeting the icon, the idea, the moment, or, as she refers to herself at one point, “the product” that is Lady Gaga in person. Before me is a petite woman with artfully disheveled auburn hair and little makeup, wearing a vintage lace dress, oversize biker jacket, and ankle boots. She’s funny, self-deprecating, warm, and comfortingly present. I can’t help but wonder what dark arts, what spell it is that transforms her into such a terrifyingly brilliant powerhouse of a performer.

She’s gearing up for the release of her seventh album, after what fans (a.k.a. Monsters) might consider creative detours, but she feels are all part of the same journey—an album of jazz standards with Tony Bennett, and Harlequin, a companion to the Joker sequel, Folie à Deux. The appetite for this record is huge. Her last pop album, Chromatica, dropped at the height of the pandemic and missed out on the hype it deserved. So the Monsters are hangry. I’m here to tell them that her latest album, Mayhem, is a feast.

She moves from the sofa where we’ve been chatting to a chair by a mixing board, to play me the new songs. This is a moment a million Monsters would kill for, and once my gay panic subsides, I’m taking it all in. Gaga bounces in her seat, stomps her black boots, and seems as excited to be listening to it as I am. I cannot wait to be at a club surrounded by my queer friends dancing to this record. It’s euphoric, like a sharp inhale. I feel it in my chest, my heart. “We need this!” I tell her. She smiles, sweetly relieved that I love it.

Coat, bodysuit, Christian Dior. Tights, Calzedonia. Necklace, brooch, Tiffany & Co. Shoes, KNWLS.

The sound is hard to pin down. She describes one track as a “happy apocalyptic tune” and says her influences include “’90s alternative, electro-grunge, Prince and Bowie melodies, guitar and attitude, funky bass lines, French electronic dance, and analog synths.” From a genre perspective, she says, “Mayhem is utter chaos!” She adds the record "just feels good to me. It sounds good. It breaks a lot of rules and has a lot of fun.”

When making music Gaga sees a wall of color—a phenomenon known as synesthesia. “As I’m writing, it assembles in my brain, then through the recording it becomes a full piece of color,” she says. “Every song is a different shade. A lot of the songs on this album have a maroon, brown color to them. ‘Bad Romance’ was like that—it was reddish.”

I ask how she knows if a song is going to be a hit. “There are great records that I make that will have their moment of completion and I’ll go, it’s not a hit, but I love it,” she says. “Other records, I’ll just know that it has everything it needs. A hit is very powerful at conveying that the energy in the artist is going to get transferred into the listener.”

Whereas in the past Gaga might have approached a new album with a fully formed idea of the work she’s about to make, knowing what it’s going to be called and even what the art will look like, with this, she tells me “I was actually pretty hard on myself about not walking into the studio with any preconceived ideas that I was going to strangle onto. Mayhem is about following your own chaos into whatever cranny of your life that it takes you to. And in that way, it was about following the songs. Writing as many songs as I did for this album was a labour of total love. And then you just have to be very cutthroat by the end.”


Top, shorts, Rick Owens. Tights, Maison Margiela. Sunglasses, Balenciaga. Necklace, Tiffany & Co. Shoes, Le Silla.

She confesses that, up until now, she had always felt it was her stage name, Gaga, that created the music. Now she recognizes that “it came from me. I’m the creator and I made all of it, and that helped me to value myself as a musician and a songwriter in a deeper way.” I ask if this realization means she might drop the stage name. She looks aghast at the suggestion (phew!) and rushes to say, “No! I love being Lady Gaga. I love being me. I just mean that I became a star when I was 20. Everything gets reflected back to you that this persona is what makes you special.”

We talk about this separation of public and private self and how it has affected her over two decades. She admits to having “a broken feeling” about some of the mental health issues she has had in her life. “I feel some embarrassment, and that’s a very vulnerable thing to share. But I think through making this album, I was able to really love myself through all of that. Confronting the music was a way of confronting some of the things I’ve been through and saying, ‘It’s okay that’s who you are.’ And celebrating that about myself, instead of trying to pretend it’s not real.”

She tells me that making Mayhem was a process of rediscovery. “The chaos I thought was long gone is fully intact and ready to greet me whenever I’d like. Part of the message of even the first song on the album is that your demons are with you in the beginning and they are with you in the end, and I don’t mean it in a bleak way. Maybe we can make friends sooner with this reality instead of running all the time.”

I wonder if embracing the darkness inside rather than trying to kill it with the artificial brightness of a spotlight has allowed Gaga to let in something softer, more natural, closer to sunshine. She’s valuing the small moments at home with her friends, her dogs, and her fiancé, Michael Polansky, as much as, if not more than, the performances. “Everyday poetry,” she calls it. She explains that even though the “Disease” video is so dark in a way, the process of creating it wasn’t painful. “It was easier to make it [once she was at peace with the darkness]. It felt really fun and celebratory. Like throwing a party for all your demons.“

I used to drink a lot and smoke a lot, and I was always looking for an out. I used to call it the trapdoor. And I stopped doing that. I actually started feeling it. Being present.”

Coat, headpiece, Alexander McQueen.
 

After the interview, Gaga introduces me to Polansky, a 41-year-old venture capitalist. Gaga’s mother set the pair up after meeting him at a charity event and telling her daughter, “I’ve met your future husband.” Polansky has a kind face and a gentle energy. He also reads as completely un-celebrity-coded (despite being a multimillionaire himself), more like a good-looking dad you might chat with at the school drop-off.

“What did you think of the music?” he asks me, proudly wrapping an arm around his wife-to-be. He grins when I say that I love it and then laughs, because it’s not as if he made it.

“You helped me loads, though,” Gaga says, staring lovingly up at him. “You helped write, like, seven songs!”

Later, Polansky and I talk on the phone. He says: “It’s been one of the most incredible parts of this chapter of my life, to live with and coexist alongside someone making art and being creative in ways that very few people get to experience. I think of myself as really lucky to have been there for it.” He’s loved watching her evolve in the years they’ve known each other, and particularly he says, “return to finding a lot of joy in making art, performing, and writing music.”

“This album was so much fun to watch her make,” he adds. “She recorded it right down the street from our house, so we could easily walk back and forth from the studio. I spent a lot of time with her, bringing my laptop to work while she was there. What surprised me most was how fast she is. I couldn’t believe how quickly a song would take shape. Within five minutes, 80 percent of the song would have come from nothing.”

I’m interested in what it’s like navigating a relationship with someone so famous. “Accepting that you won’t have the privacy others might have was the hardest part,” he says. “But Stefani’s comfort with it and patience with me has been amazing. Our relationship is probably a lot like everyone else’s. We just have to figure out how to do some of it in public. That makes it even more important for us to have strong friendships and close family relationships. We find normalcy where we can.”

With Polansky, Gaga’s life has a different shade to it; it’s more wholesome. “He used to say to me when we first met, ‘You are a special human being when the cameras aren’t on you. And I get to see that all the time,’” she tells me.

They love to host at their L.A. home. “We make pasta together; we roast things. We also really like making simple dishes with Michael’s mom, who lives nearby.” It’s no secret that Gaga gets on well with older people (“I loved Tony Bennett”) and calls her own mother one of her best friends, alongside Michael’s mother, Ellen. “She and I have built our friendship by sharing our life experiences with each other. It’s about the way we grew up, being a woman in the workplace, what her experience was like and what mine is like, and kind of tracking different generations.”

She tells me a story. “A while ago my friend Margo was over, and we were talking about lots of things, but at some point I showed her the ‘Disease’ video, and she was smiling. And then she said to me, ‘You know, this girl’”—that is, the one violently writhing around while chained to a pole, and the bloody-eyed, latex-clad demon puking up black bile—“‘well, she also makes great broccoli.’ It was a really sweet moment where somebody that I love and care about knows that as much as I wanted her to like my video, making her dinner was the number one joy of my evening.”


 

Joy. There’s a lot more of it in her life these days. She’s finding it in “real conversations, real relationships, the authentic stories that we share with each other. I think there’s an element of ‘Fake it till you make it’ all the time in life…but I also believe in being real, with yourself and with people around you. And I think, sometimes, when we have those real conversations, we can feel less alone.”

We meet six days after the results of the American election are announced. Mayhem has been unleashed on a global political stage—no one could accuse Gaga of not reading the room. “What’s bizarre is I did not write this album thinking that this would happen. I prayed it would not. But here we are.”

Gaga endorsed Kamala Harris. She also performed at Biden’s inauguration in 2021, which she has previously called one of the proudest moments of her life.

I ask how she’s been feeling. “The main thing is I have so much compassion and love for so many people who are afraid today. I want to acknowledge that I’m a very blessed person, and I feel grateful for so much in my life every day. I know for a lot of people, this election was devastating for their existence, so community is going to be the number one thing. I am one of many people who support the [LGBTQ and other marginalized] communities. And we’re not going down without a fight. We will stick together. It’s going to be hard, but I’m up for it. We’re up for it. And I just want everyone to know how deeply they’re loved and not invisible.”

The music industry has changed so much since Lady Gaga released her first album, The Fame, in 2008: social media, streaming, and, finally, music’s own #MeToo moment, with some high-profile people being held accountable for their abuse of power. Right now, pop is celebrating strong women solo artists like never before and giving them the space to be themselves. Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX—“They’re amazing,” Gaga says. “They’re strong and vibrant and creative and artistic. I think they’re being celebrated because they’re wonderful.”

If she could tell these younger pop artists anything, “it would be that the whole you matters. Who you are at home is just as valuable as who you are when you’re onstage. And no matter what anyone says to you, you can value who you are outside of all of this.”

She takes a beat then adds, “I’ve been in this business for years. Being a woman and a product at the same time was really exhausting.”

The artwork for the new album plays with this duality, but it’s not as simple as public and private, good and bad, light and dark—it is about what she calls a “radical acceptance” of all of it—of the mayhem. She says she’s “having a lot of fun exploring imagery that is different from things that I’ve done before. Things that used to really scare me are now really exciting.”

“Such as?”

“Well, playing with transgressive and challenging themes that make me think of my own anxiety. I couldn’t do that for a really long time. And now it’s just what I naturally want to do. It’s interesting that I could go through a period of being afraid as a person and wanting nothing to do with those themes and then feeling good now and being like, ‘Let’s do all this dark stuff.’”

The concept of radical acceptance comes up a lot during our chat, and feels key to the message she wants to convey about who she is and how she feels about her life and art right now. “I’m not going to torture myself,” she says. “I’m going to celebrate. I used to drink a lot and smoke a lot, and I was always looking for an out. I used to call it the trapdoor. I used to be like, ‘I need an escape route.’ And I stopped doing that. And I actually started feeling it. Being present. As an artist, it’s hard to go through that and not want to share that with my fans.”

We talk about failure, not a word I associate with the megastar. But Joker: Folie à Deux has had mixed reviews. “People just sometimes don’t like some things,” she says matter-of-factly. “It’s that simple. And I think to be an artist, you have to be willing for people to sometimes not like it. And you keep going even if something didn’t connect in the way that you intended.” She adds that the fear of failure is what can be really damaging: “When that makes its way into your life, that can be hard to get control of. It’s part of the mayhem.”

Embracing demons, darkness, nightmares, and the sprawling id that bubbles just below the surface in all of us reminds Gaga of her love for Alexander McQueen, Isabella Blow, and Daphne Guinness: “There are amazing artists throughout history who had a relationship to dark poetry as a way of feeling alive.” But for Gaga, there were several years when she lost track of where the darkness began and ended. “It was everywhere all the time. And that was not a sustainable life.”

“So now, the darkness is more specific or channeled?” I ask. “Yeah, channel it in the music and onstage, but then in my life…”

“You’re making the broccoli?”

“Exactly!”

It remains to be seen just how being in this new place will affect Gaga’s style and approach to fashion. On the ELLE shoot, she brought her own looks from home to try out and she’s not about to stop having fun with the more outlandish costumes we love her for—in fact, the eponymous character of Mayhem who haunts this album and drives the car in the ‘Disease’ video presents ample opportunities to play with gothic subversion. But, Gaga tells me, “I’m just trying to feel as in my skin as possible and not like I’m performing all the time.”

She adds, “I feel really at ease about fashion and clothes. For me, I’m at a place in my life where I just want to feel like myself in clothes. Whatever that means. So if that’s changing, I just want to go with that feeling.”

Most recently, she’s been wearing a lot of baby doll dresses, because she’s become fascinated with porcelain dolls. “They’re so fragile. And they’re beautiful too.” She used to be scared of them, and we agree they’re pretty freaky, but as with so many things now she’s leaning into that old fear and reclaiming it.

Family has always been a steadying force for Gaga. But now, for the first time, she’s considering starting her own with Michael. “Family—it’s like the roots of the tree,” she says. “They grow long, and sometimes they’re mangled, and sometimes they’re full of water, and sometimes they’re thirsty. Family is what makes you who you are, and it also defines your need for change.”

“If you were to have a child,” I ask, “what would you want them to understand about you as an artist and also as a person as they grew up?”

It’s not an easy question, but she has a thoughtful answer: “I would want my children to understand that whatever my artistry means to them is totally up to them. I would never actually want to shape it or tell them how to think about me. Maybe other than that I just did my best. And tried to stay true to myself along the way. That’s something Michael and I have talked about a lot—allowing our kids to be their own people. It’s such an intense thing for kids coming into the world. And they’re told how to think and what to believe in and how to eat…I just kind of want to let my kids find out who they are.’” Unless, she jokes, they want to work in entertainment.

“My kid might one day say, ‘Mom, why do you do these things? I saw a funny video of you dressed up.’ Most certainly that will happen. And you know, maybe it’s okay to say, ‘What do you think?’”

As a parent to a 6-year-old myself, I warn Gaga that kids will bring you down to earth with a thud. In fact, I go as far as to show her a note my daughter has written to the pop star on hearing that I will be interviewing her on Saturday afternoon, and not taking her to the toy shop as planned. “Lady Gaga,” it reads in pink pen. “I like you, but your [sic] not the best.”

Yep, I say, kids are endlessly humbling. Gaga thinks the note is hilarious. “Oh, I’m ready,” she says, folding the scrap of paper and putting it in her jacket pocket for those moments, we laugh, when she’s getting too big for her boots.

I’m so pleased Gaga has a great sense of humor—not least because that note could have really backfired otherwise. I take the opportunity to ask if she has a favorite meme of herself. “I like bus, club, another club because it’s me saying something about how hard I work, but it comes across in this really funny way. So, there’s something good at the heart of it.”

Lady Gaga is just two years away from 40. So what is she most interested in understanding about herself today?

“This is going to be the most weird answer. I’d actually like things to be less about me. I really want to be there for people around me as much as I can. That’s the thing that makes me the most happy. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to be an artist. But I think the thing I’d like in my forties is to discover all the ways I can show up better for people in my life. All the ways that I can create positivity and joy. Music’s just one way that I do it.”

  

For Gaga, a full life in the not-too-distant future will involve “me and Michael and our kids,” she states without a shadow of a doubt. “Sometimes I worry people will say I’m boring these days, but honestly, thank God I’m boring. Thank God! Because I was living on the edge. I don’t know what was going to happen to me living that way. So the fact that I have these answers, on the one hand, I’m like, ‘Oh man, snooze fest!’ But actually, I’m so grateful. Because I found a sense of happiness and joy that is true to me.”

Hair by Akki Shirakawa at Art Partner; makeup by Frankie Boyd at Streeters; manicure by Miho Okawara; produced by Dana Brockman at Viewfinders. / This story appears in the February 2025 issue of ELLE.