Lady Gaga sat down with CBS Sunday Morning to talk Chromatica and the period before she made the record, during which she was in a deep depression.
Said Gaga: “I just totally gave up on myself. I hated being famous. I hated being a star. I felt exhausted and used up.”
Gaga talked about coming to hate her piano, on which she’d written so many songs: “I don’t know how to explain it. But I went from looking at this piano, and thinking, you ruined my life. During this time, I was like, You made me Lady Gaga. My biggest enemy is Lady Gaga. That’s what I was thinking: My biggest enemy is her. What did you do? You can’t go to the grocery store now. If you go to dinner with your family, somebody comes to the table, you can’t have a dinner with your family without it being about you. It’s always about you. All the time it’s about you. And your outfits. Look at your outfits! Why you gotta be like that?”
Gaga spoke about her last album, Joanne, and said she wrote it to try and clear the trauma from her father’s life which she had inherited. She said she wanted to fix her dad’s life, but ultimately realized “I could never fix that.”
“It’s not always easy, if you have mental issues, to let other people see,” Gaga added. “I used to show. I used to self-harm. I used to say, ‘Look. I cut myself. See, I’m hurt,’ ’cause I didn’t think anyone could see. Because mental health, it’s invisible.”
Gaga said she thought about committing suicide every day: “I didn’t really understand why I should live other than to be there for my family. That was an actual real thought and feeling: Why should I stick around?”
Gaga said her dark thoughts are most often triggered by “objectification,” people taking photos of her when she’s trying to have a private life, but said friends and family lifted her up.
“I don’t hate Lady Gaga anymore. I found a way to love myself again, even when I thought that was never gonna happen. Now, I look at this piano and I go, Oh, my God. My piano! My piano that I love so much! My piano that lets me speak. My piano that lets me make poetry. My piano, that’s mine!”
Gaga also spoke about the importance of wearing a mask and getting through the pandemic.
“You’re kind right now. You’re wearing a mask in this interview,” she said to journalist Lee Cowan. “We have cameras around us. Everybody here has a mask on. These are kind acts. Wear a mask!”
