While Lady Gaga has never truly receded from mainstream popularity, she gained a resurgence this year with her latest album, Mayhem. The past few years produced a few flops, but Gaga being Gaga, she bounced right back with an album that pulls from all the best elements of her early work.
Speaking with Rolling Stone on a new video segment called “My Life in 10 Songs,” Lady Gaga posited that the most influential music in our lives usually comes when we’re young. “I feel like those formative years when you’re first discovering music is when you’re like a sponge, and you soak everything up,” she said.
It seems like a daunting task to define Gaga’s life in 10 songs. But her choices are as surprising as they are completely on brand. She’s truly one of pop culture’s great enigmas.
Lady Gaga’s First-Choice Life-Defining Songs
“Thunder Road” from Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 album Born to Run made Lady Gaga’s list immediately. “Springsteen has influenced me my whole career,” she said. “Bruce had a very particular 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.”
Springsteen’s influence is strong on Born This Way. From the Americana elements of “Yoü and I” and her alter ego Jo Calderone, down to the motorcycle-Gaga hybrid on the album cover. But it’s more of an amorphous sense of influence rather than cut-and-dry references to Springsteen. Which worked better, considering it was a more personal record.
In the way that Born This Way was Gaga “looking back on a particular time in my life,” the song “Thunder Road” affects her the same. She said that it reminds her of her father, and represents “romanticizing the past, but in this way where you have this beautiful memory of how you let things go.”
Next, Gaga chose “Nicotine & Gravy” off of Beck’s 1999 album Midnight Vultures. This song took her back to her teenage years. She explained that it “really spoke to who I was as a 19-year-old living in the Lower East Side, and getting my kicks with the locals. 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.”
An interesting Influence on ‘Born This Way’ Came From a Gay Protestant Pastor
Lady Gaga showed all the interesting tricks she had up her sleeve when she named “I Was Born This Way” by Motown singer, pastor, and activist Carl Bean. The song came out in 1977, before Bean founded the Unity Fellowship Church Movement, a liberal Protestant denomination that supports the Black and LGBTQ communities. But as an openly gay activist in the 80s, Bean founded the Minority AIDS Project of Los Angeles.
That being said, Gaga shared that Bean’s version of “I Was Born This Way” heavily influenced her own 2011 album. “I heard it, and I was like, ‘I wonder if there’s a way to flip this into a modern pop record,’” she said. “The genesis of this gave way to something that I think for me is the most important record of my career. Not just for me artistically, but for what it means.”
Building from the foundation of Carl Bean, Born This Way and its title track became a huge moment for the LGBTQ community in 2011. It was also big for literally anyone else who existed outside the status quo. Before that, there wasn’t really a song, in mainstream pop music at least, that celebrated being “other” so openly.
Lady Gaga Hops Among Decades and Genres With Her Remaining Favorites
Lady Gaga’s other picks were similarly varied. She chose Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”, David Bowie’s “Watch That Man”, and Heavy Metal Kids’ “Hey Little Girl”.
“When you find records that help you understand or see yourself, or they become the soundtrack to you and your friend group, that’s pretty powerful,” she said of the previous three songs.
She also praised Stevie Wonder and Carole King, naming “Superstition” and “Tapestry” as her next choices. According to Gaga, Mayhem had some moments where she was channeling Stevie Wonder, or at least thinking about him.
Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” and Miles Davis’ “So What” made the list next. Two songs from 1959 are pretty on brand for Lady Gaga, thinking about the Jazz & Piano segment of her Las Vegas residency and her friendship with Tony Bennett.
And That’s Five More For Free, Courtesy of Gaga
When I said it would be difficult to define Lady Gaga’s life in just ten songs, that especially goes for Lady Gaga. She ended with 15 songs total. Gaga shared love for classic rock staples from the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin next, naming “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Thank You”. Commenting on the Zeppelin track, Gaga noted that the duality of “Thank You” resonated with her.
“It was kind of like learning that the unattainable rock ‘n’ roll god could really love you,” she explained. “That there was a human being underneath the legend of it all. This idea of drama and theatricality in music, and then sincerity. I think those were two things that kind of yin-yang for me.”
Her final picks: “Tear You Apart” by She Wants Revenge, “Never Enough” by The Cure, and “Stress” by Justice. She laughed that she could “go on and on and on,” but these 15 songs actually give a great, if rudimentary, look into her many and varied influences.
Photo by Samir Hussein/Getty Images for Live Nation
The post Lady Gaga Shares the Songs That Have Defined Her Life so Far, Including One That Directly Inspired ‘Born This Way’ appeared first on VICE.
