Lady Gaga is back to making standards on her sixth (and a half) album, Harlequin, and it’s the first time she’s doing it without Tony Bennett. After two collaborative albums of standards — Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale — this time she’s Joker-fying the genre by singing in a manner inspired by her Joker: Folie à Deux character, Harley Quinn. “I would say that that meta-modernism actually played a real role in how we approached this in the studio,†Gaga told Rolling Stone. But how would Bennett have felt about her changing up these standards? “If I had put rock-and-roll chords over production in a record that I did with Tony years ago, I don’t know how he would’ve felt about that,†Gaga said. “Tony didn’t love rock and roll. But he would’ve said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’†Okay, so, she’s saying he would have kinda lied, right? But in a cute way?
Gaga goes onto say that Bennett was “a really compassionate, inclusive person,†who didn’t ask questions like “Why is she dressed that way? Why is she singing that way? Why is her stage performance so theatrical?†Totally understandable, but also the fun part here is the implication that he probably thought it. So now, a salute to Tony Bennett: a man who knew what not to say to Lady Gaga.