In the summer of 2023, Lady Gaga began dropping hints about a mysterious project she’d been working on in secret—new music, so she claimed, that sounded nothing like her past work. Fans wondered whether it could be “LG7,” the long-awaited follow-up to 2020’s <i>Chromatica</i>, until September 2024, when billboards popped up with the message “LG6.5.” The surprise between the pop auteur’s sixth and seventh studio albums turns out to be <i>Harlequin</i>, a concept album delivered from the warped perspective of Lee Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, her character in Todd Phillips’ Joker-fied jukebox musical <i>Joker: Folie à Deux</i>.
As is often the case for actors who temporarily inhabit Gotham City, Gaga realized shortly after filming wrapped that she hadn’t yet moved on from the character she’d been embodying. She began to conceptualize an album of updated jazz standards sung as the Joker’s main squeeze. <i>Harlequin</i>, recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu alongside LG7, works as a companion piece to the film, but it’s also distinctly aligned with Gaga’s singular vision.
First, though, Gaga developed Lee’s singing ability for the role. “I did a lot of different kinds of work to create her,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “One of the things that I did was change my voice in the film. It’s Lee’s voice, and it’s really raw, and it’s really naked. It’s very untrained. Not proper breathing.” How did the superstar with the powerhouse vocals achieve this? “I think that Joaquin [Phoenix] scared the living shit out of me every day until my voice left my body.”
Who else could pull off a reimagining of the 1932 classic “I’ve Got the World on a String” as a gritty surf-rock slow-burner (“What if The Cramps made a French song?”) or deliver a song from an obscure 1964 musical as an ’80s rock ripper? That song, “The Joker,” originates from <i>The Roar of the Greasepaint - The Smell of the Crowd</i>, though it could have been written exactly for Gaga to sing right now—as could the 1952 standard “That’s Entertainment,” popularized by Judy Garland: “Everything that happens in life can happen in a show/You can make ’em laugh, you can make ’em cry/Anything can go!” But listen closely and you’ll hear Gaga’s subtly twisted tweaks: the cheery lyrics of “Good Morning” by way of <i>Singin’ in the Rain</i> (“Good morning/Rainbows are shining through!”) are replaced with the gleefully sinister “Bang bang, you’re black and blue!”
Considering her professional and personal relationship with the late Tony Bennett and her own jazz residency in Vegas, Gaga is very intimate with the genre. Yet she realizes that Bennett probably would not have approved of her take on the songs this time around: “We did so much that Tony would never have been cool with.” The Oscar winner also delves into the psychology of the album’s original cut “Happy Mistake.” “When women play these broken characters in music or in films or theater, the audience loves it, and they just cheer us on,” she said. “They cheer on the image of pain. It’s super confusing. That song is in a lot of ways about that.”
