Lady Gaga had a tremendous 2017. At least that’s the way it seemed to the outside world.
The “Bad Romance” hitmaker starred in the Super Bowl LI Halftime show in February, which attracted 117.5 million viewers in the United States. She also headlined the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, launched her Joanne World Tour and released her Netflix documentary, “Gaga: Five Two,” which was supposed to be a behind-the-scenes look at her Super Bowl performance and Joanne tour.
Actually, behind-the-scenes, Gaga had begun production on “A Star is Born,” just as her mental health was unraveling, as she revealed in a new cover story with Rolling Stone.
“I did ‘A Star Is Born’ on lithium,” the pop mega-star revealed, “offhandedly,” Rolling Stone said. Right after shooting “A Star is Born,” she began her Joanne tour, and she experienced what she described as a psychotic break.
“There was one day that my sister said to me, ‘I don’t see my sister anymore,’” Gaga told Rolling Stone. “And I canceled the tour. There was one day I went to the hospital for psychiatric care. I needed to take a break. I couldn’t do anything … I completely crashed. It was really scary.”
Gaga didn’t reveal her mental health diagnosis in the interview, but lithium is a mood stabilizer typically prescribed to manage the symptoms of bipolar disorder.
“There was a time where I didn’t think I could get better,” she continued. “I feel really lucky to be alive. I know that might sound dramatic, but we know how this can go.”
Whatever was going on with Gaga privately, she scored more acclaim for her performance in “A Star is Born” when it was released in the fall of 2018. Gaga also earned an Academy Award nomination for what Rolling Stone said was another of her “emotionally transparent performances,” playing an ascending singer-songwriter in love with another artist troubled by addiction (played by Bradley Cooper).
As Gaga told Rolling Stone, she now considers herself “a healthy, whole person.” She gives a lot of the credit for her recovery to her fiance, San Francisco-based entrepreneur and venture capitalist Michael Polansky. She said he encouraged her to return to her core values and make pop music again.
That suggestion led to Gaga making “Mayhem,” her first album in five years. Rolling Stone called “Mayhem” one of the greatest albums of her career. It’s been nominated for seven Grammys, including Album of the Year. Gaga also is in the middle of her “The Mayhem Ball” world tour, which stopped in San Francisco in July and which concludes in April. This writer praised Gaga’s show as “joyous, freaky, gothic, glorious, theatrical and even operatic.”
As Gaga told Rolling Stone, the music she wrote for the album was drawn from that dark period of her life. “I was willingly and openly running through all the nightmares of my past and my present and just finding poetry in all of it,” she said. “And that was a sign of my health as a musician. One of the things I’m most grateful for is gaining all my artistic faculties back to make this record. I had to dig very, very deep, and I had to change a lot of my life and recenter around what I needed as a human being.”
When Gaga met Polansky in 2019 at a fundraiser, she told Rolling Stone she was “in rough shape.” Polansky told Rolling Stone that he was saddened to see how “disempowered she felt.” He said: “I’d never met somebody so incredibly talented and gifted feel so disempowered.”
To that, Gaga said that Polansky saw someone who feels “very far away from what they’re supposed to be doing.” He also said that he wanted to take care of her. “I’ve never been loved that way,” she said. “My life was serious to him. It was not a party. He helped me see that my life was precious.”
They plan to marry “soon” and parenthood will be next, Rolling Stone said. “Being a mom is the thing I want the most,” Gaga said. “And he’s gonna be a beautiful father. We’re really excited about that.”