Lady Gaga wasn’t fairly able to let her Joker: Folie à Deux character go, so she created an accompanying 13-track album titled Harlequin.
Joker: Folie à Deux follows Phoenix’s return as Arthur Fleck, a.ok.a the Joker, who's now confined in Arkham Asylum. There, he meets Gaga’s Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, they usually kind a powerfully chaotic bond with the objective of inflicting mayhem throughout Gotham City. Unlike the primary Joker movie, the sequel features a collection of musical numbers, which is the place followers see Gaga in her factor.
“This idea of dual identities was always something that was a part of my music making,” Gaga shared in a brand new interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of the inspiration behind Harlequin. “I was always creating characters in my music and when I made Lee for Joker, she just really had this profound effect on me. The film had so much music in it, so much music that I love, and I was able to discover the character through the story, through the music that we did live every day as well as dance and the costumes and the makeup. So I kind of had this deep experience with the character and she just didn’t really leave me creatively and I decided I wanted to make a whole album inspired by her.”
She continued, “She’s a really complex woman and I think, particularly as a woman in music and a female producer, it was really fun to go, ‘This album will be and I will be what I want, when I decide, whenever I feel like it. If I want it to be blues, it’ll be blues. If I want it to be funk, it’ll be funk. If I want it to be soul, it’ll be soul.'”
The undertaking options covers of previous classics — together with reimagined showtunes like “Good Morning” (Singing within the Rain) and “If My Friends Could See Me Now” (Sweet Charity) — and “celebrates a figure who thrives on danger, who lives for the undefinable, and who embraces the beautiful chaos of her own dreams,” per a press launch. Harlequin additionally options two authentic songs, the dramatic waltz “Folie à Deux” and the acoustic ballad “Happy Mistake.”
“BloodPop and I had written this together and then I kind of took it to the next place,” she stated of “Happy Mistake,” earlier than including, “It was all in the image of the character, but also kind of at the very core of her soul, which is really just me. Every character I play, it just has me as the gravity. I am wrestling, on that record, with a lot of feelings about so much that I’ve been through as an artist, everything I went through growing up in the public eye, and the industry since I was a teenager.”
Ultimately, Gaga says filming the Joker movie with Phoenix was a “really soulful experience” for her. “It’s like these two people find love in this really dark place and it brings them all the light,” she defined.
Watch Zane Lowe’s full interview with Lady Gaga beneath. Joker: Folie à Deux hits theaters on Oct. 4.
