“””””PLACE YOUR ORDERS WITHOUT ANY HESITATIONS”””””

HOW LADY GAGA FOUND HERSELF AGAIN: ‘I FEEL LUCKY TO BE ALIVE’

The pop superstar on returning from the brink, finding love, and making one of her greatest albums

By BRIAN HIATT

Visuals by GREG SWALES

High above the crowd, she’s lightheaded, too aware of a pounding heart. As the dress glides forward and her band crashes into the evening’s first chords, she braces herself against the adrenaline flood that once felt like her reason to live. “When I am not onstage, I feel dead,” she told me in our last encounter, 14 years and several mental-health crises ago, before she’d ever seen a therapist. “Whether that is healthy or not … is really of no concern to me.” She bragged back then of not sleeping or eating, of living on “coffee and music.” She was dating, on and off, a surly, metalhead bartender she considered her muse. Everyone around her called her Gaga.

She was about to finish her second album, Born This Way, which went on to sell 14 million copies. It was easy, at that point, to envision the rest of her career as a clean upward arc. Her next album was the jagged Artpop, which fans would eventually embrace as a favorite. But critics were hostile, sales slowed, and Gaga faced the first backlash of her career, in an already fragile moment. She’d been suppressing trauma since age 19, when, she’s said, a music producer raped her. In the Artpop era, it was breaking through.

She tried to escape it all, and managed to record some of her biggest hits along the way. She made jazz albums with her friend Tony Bennett, nailing “Lush Life,” the Billy Strayhorn composition Frank Sinatra found too hard to sing. She veered into movie stardom, specializing in emotionally transparent performances that were difficult to reconcile with her layered music-world personae. She knocked off a (great) soundtrack LP for A Star Is Born, experimented with the off-­kilter, Americana-tinged Joanne — anything but a straight-up Lady Gaga pop album.

Even as she played the Super Bowl halftime show and won Golden Globes and an Oscar, her psyche was unraveling. “I did A Star Is Born on lithium,” she offhandedly reveals. On the Joanne world tour, right after shooting that film, she experienced what she’s described as a psychotic break. “There was one day that my sister said to me, ‘I don’t see my sister anymore,’ ” she says. “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. There was a time where I didn’t think I could get better.…  I feel really lucky to be alive. I know that might sound dramatic, but we know how this can go.”

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