Lady Gaga Shares 'My Life in 10 Songs,' Talks Bruce Springsteen, Carole King, The Cure, and More

Hi, this is Lady Gaga, and this is my life in 10 songs or more. One of the first songs that I chose kind of instantly was Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen has influenced me my whole career. My album Born This Way was heavily influenced by Bruce Springsteen. Bruce had a very particular kind of grit and soulfulness, and when I was making Born This Way, I thought a lot about how to incorporate who I really am into my music, even more than I did during The Fame. The Fame was an album that was more about my dream for myself. Born This Way was more of an album that was looking back on a particular time in my life. I think I fell in love with New York all over again through Bruce's music, because of the proximity to New Jersey and that whole kind of area, even Billy Joel being kind of like the other side of that. I think the music that affected me the most in my life happened pretty early. I feel like those formative years when you're first discovering music is when you're like a sponge and you kind of soak everything up. I remember feeling like I was learning about my dad through this song, because my dad is from New Jersey. Bruce is from Jersey. It was the way that he told his life story. It was incredibly visual and poetic. The record is kind of one long poem. It doesn't have all the qualities, actually, of other kind of soulful Americana songs. It's got this unique fingerprint. I think this is, for me, where I realized that music could help you get to know not only yourself, but someone else better. My dad used to play it for me in the living room when I was a kid. My dad used to sing it to me as if he knew I was going to grow up one day and leave him behind. In a way, I think Bruce is singing that like, Mary's going to leave everyone behind in this. It's always kind of what I made up about it, is that it was a song that was romanticizing the past, but in this way where you kind of have this beautiful memory of how you let things go. Nicotine and Gravy by Beck. I definitely fell in love with Beck in high school, but then even more when I left school. I sort of became obsessed with his music. Midnight Vultures, Guero, Gueralito, Odele. I mean, I was so into him as an artist. He is just such an innovative artist. He has a unique kind of ability to navigate himself through so many different genres of music with a lot of fun and humor, but it's serious business. You have to be really proficient to do it. Nicotine and Gravy I just always loved because it was just so much fun. It was so creative and it was so imaginative and it had this style and this swagger and this sound that was so uniquely him. I think Nicotine and Gravy was like a song that was about kind of like falling in love with the fantasy of somebody. It was really fun and kind of wild, but my understanding of that song actually changed the older that I got with the release of more of his music. This was a very different Beck. When I look back on Midnight Vultures, it had kind of this like youthful quality to it that was about exploratory and voyeuristic way of life. And then I think Morning Phase was really about healing and about stillness and calm. For me, Nicotine and Gravy really spoke to who I was as a 19-year-old living on the Lower East Side and kind of getting my kicks with the locals. I looked back on it going like, oh, he changed. I would say the way that it affected my life the most is that watching Beck change made me feel like I wanted to change. I Was Born This Way, Carl Bean is a record that a friend of mine, Yeppe Larson, brought to me when I was like in my early 20s, and it was before I wrote Born This Way. I learned all about him and his life, and he was this pastor in California that was incredibly inspiring, and he had this career in music, and he made this amazing song that was so inspiring to the LGBTQ plus community, and he was such a force and a leader. I was so inspired by that song. I heard it, and I was like, I wonder if there's a way to like flip this into like a modern pop record. So I worked with Yeppe on it, and we got to work. But I think it's like kind of this classic record that is so important, and it's so meaningful to me too, because the entire energy around Born This Way, my song, entirely depended upon the song. The genesis of this gave way to something that I think for me is the most important record of my whole career, not just for me artistically, but for what it means. And every night that I play it, I think about Carl Bean, and I think about I Was Born This Way. In I Gotta Da Vida is a song by Iron Butterfly that my mom played for me when I was, I think, in high school. I had been like writing songs that were kind of like fantasy with like nonsensical words in it, and my mom was like, you gotta hear this song. I think they were like really drunk in the studio, and they were trying to like sing In the Garden of Eden, and then it came out as In I Gotta Da Vida, and then they kept it that way. So I thought that was always, I don't know, just really cool. I know it like stuck in the back of my mind that you could make a hit record with words that you make up. That definitely stayed with me through like all my music, and then like made a comeback for Abracadabra, some version of real words, but not really. When I am writing songs, I'm listening to something that's coming to me in my head, and then I'm putting it down. Usually the way I hear it is the way I want it. It's got to evoke a feeling. It has to be catchy, and it has to be fun. The most honest thing I could say about it is that I like, I'm hearing something in my head as we're writing, and I gotta get it down. Usually the way I hear it is the way I want it. Watch That Man by David Bowie is a record that was on my turntables in my kitchen on the Lower East Side. I had my two turntables and that vinyl up every day, and every morning I put it on. I really discovered David Bowie through my friend, Lady Starlight. I would kind of like vent to her in my apartment and just say like, I play out, and I was hustling with record labels and executives, and they would say, yeah, you have an amazing voice, but you're really theatrical. It's pop, but it's really theater. And then I would audition for musicals and theatrical productions, and they'd be like, you're very pop. I had this conundrum as a young person. I was a little too or not enough something. She said to me, she goes, you know, David Bowie was very theatrical, and it's David Bowie. I started to kind of try to understand him as an artist and delved into his music. The album Aladdin Sane is a very, very amazing album. I felt like I identified with it, like that feeling of leaving your apartment and walking down the street. I had such a dream of making something of myself that it became kind of like this pump-up song for me. My love of David Bowie just like, it just like deepened from there, but I would say that that was one of the first songs. And then I'll add a song, a song called Hey Little Girl by the Heavy Metal Kids, which is like this really camp metal band I used to listen to like kind of coupled with Watch That Man. It sort of had this like, I don't know, this like theatrical cabaret rock thing to it. And then I would listen to the Dresden Dolls, and I would listen to Franz Ferdinand. That kind of music had a huge influence on me as I was gearing up to make my first album. David Bowie and the musicians that I just mentioned, they were like forming like a way of thinking about music in my head. When you find records that like help you understand or see yourself, or they become like the sound check to you and your friend group, that's pretty powerful. There was this idea that like, you could be kind of like rough around the edges and still glamorous. And at the time that meant a lot to me because I didn't really have much to offer other than the music I was making and all the jobs I was working. So that was pretty cool. And then that actually led me also to Semi-Precious Weapons, who was headed by Justin Tranter. And they had a song called I Can't Pay My Rent, but I'm ------- Gorgeous. That was like a huge hit in our local community and I like adore them so much. And I used to go to their shows. I got like, you know, asked to open for them. And that was like this huge deal for me that that happened. And then all of that music that I just mentioned was like happening for me at like a formative time, like as I was making my first album. I chose Superstition by Stevie Wonder. I also could have chosen Signed, Sealed, Delivered. I could have chosen I Wish. I loved and still love Stevie Wonder so much. And his records were among the earliest ones I ever listened to. And I think it was kind of his abundance of joy. I always felt in his music that he wanted everyone to be happy. That was something I started to notice was like different and who was available to share their joy with the listener and who was kind of like maybe more tortured in a different way. Specifically from Superstition, that bass line is like one of the most exciting bass lines I'd ever heard in my whole life. I started just to think about music differently. Listening to Stevie Wonder helped me to kind of think about how I could compose differently. It's like the kind of music that you have to like seep into your bones and your soul until it like finds its way into something true that's authentic to you. But I definitely like had my moments on Mayhem where I was thinking about him. Tapestry by Carole King was just like an amazing like album actually. It was just like unlike any way that I had heard a woman write before. She just was this like amazing writer. I had first fallen in love with Carole King through You've Got a Friend, James Taylor. And when I was really bullied in high school, I listened to Carole King's music and I always felt her voice and her songs are like a warm hug. And I think because I played piano and I wrote songs that I saw like a path for myself and I really just looked up to her. And I would also listen to like, you know, like totally different types of artists, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald and James. That's kind of how I experienced music. It's like a web in my mind of like all the artists that I loved, their records and then like how each record led me to another one. I would say another thing that Carole King taught me was it can be good to think about another artist while you're writing. Imagining a superstar singing the song because I'll go like, is this good enough for someone else? What might be good enough for me may not be good enough for someone else. I thought she was such an incredible vocalist and then I learned how many songs she had written for other people. That kind of taught me too about being an artist that your song should be so good that, you know, you don't have to sing them. So it like raises the bar. Dinah Washington is one of my absolute favorite jazz singers. She has like this very sweet but humorous quality to her voice. She just makes me like smile and giggle and feel it so deeply and What a Difference a Day Makes was written by Maria Grever. It is an absolutely beautiful song about how you can just be so down and out and it just takes one day to get you back. I sung it a lot in my jazz shows. I didn't sing it on tour with Tony Bennett. I kind of like discovered it later. I think I found a bit of myself, you know, as a solo jazz singer without Tony with that song, just personally. When you hear Tony sing his records, the standards that he chooses at his shows, he had like, you know, arrangements that he loved and it was like Tony's jazz. Part of what makes me a jazz singer is what I select to sing and what arrangements and why. And sometimes you like find old arrangements that you like fall in love with or you like make entirely new ones or you modernize them or you change something. It's what you select and how you choose to sing it that makes you who you are. I would say what a difference a day makes was extremely important to me because it was Dinah's Charts that I sang when I first did it and it's kind of like what was my voice, you know, without Tony and I was just starting to do that. So it was kind of very special to me. So what by Miles Davis? Well, this is another great like segue into like how I learned as a young artist. It's how you think about music and that everybody can think about music differently. It was the way that Miles thought about music that I was like really moved by as a young person. His album Kind of Blue was like critical and this was long before I ever met Tony and it was much earlier in my life. That led me to John Coltrane and Giant Steps and to Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, Duke Ellington. So like all of this music kind of like fed into each other. You start to realize that jazz is something that you have to learn it. You have to also be willing to learn about yourself. You're funneling, you know, your desire to speak through somebody else's composition and then the way that you do it is what makes it yours. Jazz without vocals was like very profound for me. Like it allowed me to kind of actually step away from the beauty of the vocalist and focus on the beauty of these players that I loved so wet. I love so wet. Rolling Stone's Sympathy for the Devil. To me, Sympathy for the Devil had like a speed of rock and roll that I hadn't heard before. When I see different speed of rock and roll too it was also so different from like Led Zeppelin and Whole Lotta Love. Thank You was a softer record but, you know, it didn't have like the same kind of like coolness that Sympathy for the Devil has. Thank You was like a more sincere love song. Pink Floyd, they were like more hallucinogenic in their music. Money was a song that had a huge effect on me. It was like one of the first records that I remember listening to. My dad put it on and I said, Dad, is that a cash register? And he was like, yeah. And I was like, but why? It's music. I think I really was always like fascinated with how you can style rock and roll differently. I love Thank You by Led Zeppelin because they have, you know, this like razor sharp, loud, just kind of epic music. And then Thank You is just like quieter and it's pretty and it's so sincere. It was kind of like, you know, learning that the unattainable rock and roll god could like really love you. There was like a human being underneath the legend of it all. This idea of like drama and theatricality in music and then sincerity. I think those are two things that kind of yin yang for me. Every time I saw these like amazing artists do something unexpected, it just reminded me that they were doing it because they love artistry and they love music so much. And they were like exploring it as if it was uncharted territory. Like they just wanted to know what was in the world of music. In the history of like music, artists like time and time again were like criticized for not giving the audience maybe the thing the audience fell in love with to begin with and like doing something new. I found it really always exciting and fascinating and interesting and cool. And on my album Mayhem, I like returned to a sound I created for myself. I think the reason I did that was because something that I created earlier in my career was new for me. And I think that like my deviations from it were like a combination of wanting to be unexpected and also not wanting to be told who to be. Tear You Apart by She Wants Revenge is a song that I just like fell in love with when I was like 18 years old. At that same time, I was really into The Cure while also listening to She Wants Revenge at the same time. Those two kind of happened at the same time for me. This kind of more electronic thing was starting to percolate for me. I think something about living on Stanton Street and the clubs I was going to. What's funny is that the clubs I was going to, a lot of them were playing metal records, but I would listen to She Wants Revenge and The Cure when I was at home in Depeche Mode. That was kind of like my internal soundtrack to what the DJs were playing. My favorite The Cure song was Never Enough. And I just like am obsessed with the production on that song. I love the song also, but the production on it is just like something else. I also, I think I related it to kind of that time in my life I like couldn't stop partying. I mean, I was writing songs and partying and that's all like on a loop. So I think that song was also kind of like the soundtrack to my routine. So I put Stress by Justice on here too because French electronic music was something that I discovered more when I moved to California. They are just like so incredibly brilliant and talented. And I remember I kind of learned about them for the first time watching the video and listening to the record. The production was so unique and so special. And the video was extremely anxiety inducing. This was like a new thing for me. I somehow felt like I deeply understood it. It almost had like a motivational grit to it. The music would like really pump me and like amp me up. I started to think a lot about like aggression in music and how beats can really change the way you experience the song. Cause if you like think of it, the song is separate from the production. I put that record on here because I can't actually even think of like a time in my career that I didn't think about Justice when I was making music. It had to do with that like unique specialness, that thing that only they had. That's more than 10. And I could go on and on and on.