How Lady Gaga Found Herself Again: ‘I Feel Lucky to Be Alive’

E
very night on her current tour, at the moment she emerges onstage as Lady Gaga, perched atop a 14-foot-high crimson gown, Stefani Germanotta starts to panic. At the center of her opera-house set, two layers of curtains part, revealing that glorious, preposterous, Clifford-size crinoline and the tiny woman ensconced within it. Twenty thousand or so now-grown Little Monsters scream for the guiding light who told them, when they needed it most, that they were born this way. They still need it.

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.”

She’s made her way back, with a lot of help from her fiancé, Michael Polansky, a kind, puppy-eyed, Harvard-educated entrepreneur who’s never called her anything but Stefani.  “Being in love with someone that cares about the real me made a very big difference,” she says. But that meant she had to figure out just who that was: “How do you learn how to be yourself with someone when you don’t know how to be yourself with anyone?”

She’s found that answer, and now considers herself “a healthy, whole person.” In March, she released Mayhem, one of the greatest albums of her career, reclaiming every bit of her musical Gagatude, in all its multiplicities, after all of her years of shying away from it. It’s up for seven Grammys, including Album of the Year. “It was months and months and months of rediscovering everything that I’d lost,” she says. “And I honestly think that’s why it’s called Mayhem. Because what it took to get it back was crazy.”

The accompanying tour, the Mayhem Ball, is the most impressive spectacle in a career full of them, but the first performances immediately confirmed how much she had changed. “I’m not an adrenaline junkie anymore,” she says. “ I used to love that feeling.”

Now, she reacts like any well-­balanced human would if they found themselves wheeled out in front of a packed arena, squeezed into a mammoth Lady Gaga costume. “I see all the fans,” she says, eyes wide, “and I’m in this big dress, and the music is so loud and it’s very dramatic … and for 90 seconds, I have to talk myself out of a panic attack.” Polansky, listening in on her mic feed, sometimes catches her breathing hard.

The feeling sustains for the entire first song: “I’m panicking a little bit during ‘Bloody Mary.’” But after that comes this year’s hit “Abracadabra,” which may well have supplanted “Bad Romance” as the Gaga-est song ever recorded, its triumphant chorus replete with authentic Moth­er Monster gibberish: “Abracadabra, morta-ooh-ga-ga/Abracadabra, abra-ooh-na-na!”

Somehow, every time she starts that song’s choreography, her heart rate slows, and she remembers who she is. All of her practice, for this tour, for every tour, kicks in. “The rehearsal of self saves me,” she says. “Every cell in my body goes, ‘You know what to do.’” Around that point, she tends to gaze out at the crowd and shout a familiar command: “Put your fucking paws up!” Yas, Stefani.

“She’s definitely not Gaga or Stefani,” Polansky tells me. “She’s both, and, yeah, they go together much better than I think people realize.”

She’d put it a little differently. “Lady Gaga’s the person who made Lady Gaga,” she says, permitting herself a small laugh at the tautology. “ I think I just feel more relaxed about it all. Like, I am Lady Gaga. You know, this idea that that has to be something specific? I think that’s an old story I used to tell myself. And I don’t really care what anyone calls it anymore. It’s just me.”

SOMETIMES, THOUGH, IT’S NOT quite that simple. On a Tuesday afternoon in early July, eight days before the start of the tour, three Lady Gagas stalk her opera house, currently installed in an empty Las Vegas arena. One Gaga is up in the giant red dress, silent and still, waiting. Another, in a leotard, is trying out choreography near a catwalk that extends into the absent crowd. The third is on the arena floor, watching them from the darkness.

The Gaga in the dress is one of the tour’s dancers, Jessica Toatoa, a petite blond who looks a bit like the real thing. In the show’s psychodrama, she portrays Gaga’s dark side, Mistress of Mayhem, when Gaga isn’t playing that part — the star of the show also sometimes embodies her light side, Mayhem’s prey, a character she thinks of as Ethereal Gaga. The Gaga in the leotard is another tour dancer, China Taylor, who’s only Gaga-ing for the sake of rehearsals, so the real performer can watch herself from offstage. (“The show is created by the person that is in the audience,” Gaga asserts.)

“Let’s get some more fog on the stage,” says Real Gaga over the PA, speaking into a microphone in the gloom. In minimal makeup, she’s dressed like her own stagehand, all in black, with a blond ponytail peeking out of a knit cap; torn fishnet stockings are the only stylistic flair she’s allowed herself. All in all, it’s the most Stefani version of her I’ve met, and the same look tour audiences will see when she reemerges at the end of each show, out of costume, her face scrubbed. Polansky calls this incarnation the Artist. Today, she periodically consults with her fiancé, a calm presence in shorts, T-shirt, and running shoes, also all in black. She sees him as her key creative partner now, and he’s credited alongside her as one of the tour’s creative directors and executive producers.

The stage smoke wafting through the air gets even heavier; strobe lights paint it crimson. Doomy synth chords echo. Even more than the finished show, this eerie, perplexing multi-Gaga spectacle feels like a glimpse into her subconscious. “You’re not wrong,” she says later. “It is this gothic dream, and it’s somehow completely related to the inner romance that I have struggled with my whole life.”

“I Believed in Suffering for Your Art. But It Was Really Not Healthy For Me”

Gaga is bearing down on the task of the day, the reason she’s assembled her doubles onstage: At the last minute, she’s adding a gut-renovated version of “Shallow” to the show, with staging that nods to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. “Getting her to the B stage is always a question,” says Polansky, and they’ve come up with a novel solution: a gondola. Her crew just needs to build her one and figure out how to propel it across the catwalk to her piano on the other side. (They’ll keep it simple, putting it on wheels and having dancers drag it across.)

“It’s so campy to sing ‘Shallow’ on a boat,” Gaga says, happily. “Sort of ridiculous! I was like, ‘This is the perfect challenge, ’cause this could be really bad.’” She also wanted to bring “Shallow” into her own aesthetic universe for the first time, since its studio arrangement so deeply reflected its cinematic origins. “It doesn’t have my signature style,” she says. She happened to remember that Mark Ronson, one of its co-writers, created an electronic drum loop that didn’t make the final recording — after she texted him, he dug it back up and sent it to her.

The song now opens with throbbing synth bass that completely transforms its mood and style. “I think what it brought out in the song is that Ally and Jackson’s relationship was actually kind of dark,” she says. “In this version I get the feeling that something really scary might happen.”

“COME WITH ME,” GAGA SAYS, and we journey through concrete corridors to her curtained-off, carpeted backstage sanctum. The decor is minimal: a big TV in a road case, a table set for a couple’s dinner, framed pictures of her and Polansky, a couple of coffee-table books (Italian Chic, Vanity Fair 100 Years). We settle into twin plush chairs, a pricey unlit candle — Santal 26, by Le Labo fragrances — on the table between us. In previous meetings, Gaga was more comfortable having me tail her through her life than with the introspection of sit-down interviews. This time, we land in heavy territory right away. She’s off the deep end; watch as she dives in.

The concert’s narrative, a dream-logic version of some of her real-life journey, allows her to do real character work, even improv, in the middle of a purported pop concert. “I’ve never acted in this way on an arena stage before,” she says, though to be fair, neither has anyone else. “It’s different every night.” She cried after one night’s show, explaining to Polansky that something new happened: “After I sang ‘Million Reasons” to Mayhem, she was afraid of me.”

She attempts to succinctly break down the story. “Mayhem is how I start the show,” she says. “It’s the most egocentric side of me, a side of being Gaga that I really loathe. I basically announce that I’m the queen, and I put a more naive and youthful version of myself into a deep sleep — with a desire to torture her, as a way of teaching her how to be great. Ethereal Gaga enjoys it. She just falls into this gothic mania, and Mayhem is aghast because her whole motivation was to teach this girl a lesson and sort of abuse her into greatness. And what she wanted doesn’t go as planned.”

There is, of course, some not-so-veiled autobiography here. “I think maybe people don’t know how heavily I was worked as a young person,” says Gaga, and I remind her of the time I watched her perform six songs after midnight for some random promotional video in 2009. Her voice gave out, and she fled the room, only to return and force herself through the inconsequential performance with a level of inhuman determination I found worrisome. Like her character, she had a habit of embracing the pain inflicted upon her. “I believed in suffering for your art. I believed in that in a way that was so real. It was almost earnest and sweet, but it was really not healthy for me.”

As she recorded Mayhem, Gaga had dreams “of these different sides of myself.” There’s a line in the industrial confessional “Perfect Celebrity” about a “clone … asleep on the ceiling,” and the disquieting single “Disease” was narrated by Gaga’s dark side before she had a name for it: “You’re so tortured when you sleep/Plagued with all your memories.”

What Gaga doesn’t quite remember — and neither did I, until I went back to my transcripts — is that she was having similar visions as early as 2011. “I had this dream that I had something evil inside of me,” she told me that year, as we rode through Manhattan in a chauffeured car. “And there was this white wall, and in order to get the negativity and the evil out of me, I had to hit the wall, and an essence would fly out of my soul center. I was trying to get rid of it — an exorcism of some sort.”

The exorcism clearly didn’t stick back then. When it came time to make the video for “Disease,” Mayhem’s first single, the Mayhem character was born. “We started exploring with the choreography this idea of me battling myself,” she says. “That song is so deliberately about somebody that wants to harm you — and it being you.” Gaga has played with horror-movie imagery before, but the “Disease” video is a coded tour of her darkest thoughts, a remarkably uncompromising way to begin an all-important album cycle. She starts the video singing as her own corpse, mowed down by a car with Mayhem at the wheel, and it gets more nightmarish from there.

Oddly enough, the video, and all of the thematic cues the tour took from it, might not have existed without Gaga’s latest movie, last October’s instantly notorious megaflop Joker: Folie á Deux. “There was a ton of negativity around Joker,” she says. “And I think I was feeling artistically rebellious at the time.”

Gaga’s deeply felt turn, alongside Joaquin Phoenix, as a tragically delusional Harley Quinn won some of the film’s only praise. Reviews were otherwise vicious. Fans of 2019’s dour Joker were outright repelled by the new film’s daring-if-not-reckless tonal leap: The original was a faux-Scorsese urban-decay drama, and this was a … surreal semi-musical about mental illness. With a cartoon segment.

After all of Gaga’s experiences, did the wave of hatred for a movie really bother her? “I wasn’t, like, unfazed,” she says, smiling at the question. “It’s funny, I’m almost nervous to share my reaction. But the truth is, when it first started happening, I started laughing. Because it was just getting so unhinged.” Her amusement eventually faded. “When it takes a while for something to kind of dissipate, that can be a little bit more painful. Only because I put a lot of myself into it.”

“Lady Gaga’s the Person Who Made Lady Gaga. Like, I am Lady Gaga”

The “Disease” video, then, was an answer to all of that hostility. “I put so much of that energy into that video,” she says. “I was in that place, you know, I was like, ‘I’ll show you who I am, and I’ll show you what this fight is like.’”

The resulting work of art cut a little too deep. “When we were done filming it, I went kind of into a dark place mentally,” Gaga says. “Maybe I scared myself a little bit.… For weeks I was really bothered. It was in my head a lot. I was actually trying to figure out what I was trying to say. There’s a side of me that’s scared of another side. And I think that there was a sense in me that I was not done healing.”

Starting with her Coachella performance in April, essentially the first draft of the show, she placed that internal battle at the center of her performance. “I decided I wanted to make it something that everybody could understand and love,” she says, “and it didn’t have to be the most dark thing that I’d ever created. Isn’t that Mayhem talking? ‘I have to be dark.’ And, like, what is that in me that I have to be the toughest or the most edgy?”

She laughs when I point out that, lightened up or not, she chose to put a concept she found psychologically destabilizing at the center of a world tour, forcing herself to revisit it night after night. “You just, um, pretty much nailed me and psychoanalyzed me all at once,” she says. “That’s very something that I would do — is have, like, a traumatic experience and then orbit everything around it.” But as she sees it, “discomfort in all areas of life can make you better. Youjust have to allow yourself to work through it.”

The “Disease” video reaches a new height of horror toward the end, when Mayhem, masked and in bondage gear, retches up a large quantity of black bile. Shortly afterward, the scenario shifts, and Ethereal Gaga wraps her foe in an embrace, singing the chorus to the monster: “I can cure your disease.” The imagery feels like a reference to a key moment in Gaga’s career, when the Artpop backlash crystallized: As she sang her song “Swine” at South by Southwest in March 2014, Gaga had a performance artist named Millie Brown vomit dyed milk on her body. It didn’t go over well. Much debate ensued about “glamorizing bulimia,” and the stunt helped cement a perception that Gaga was allowing her penchant for spectacle, and what detractors assumed was a desire to shock, overwhelm her music.

She tried to explain that the song (“You’re just a pig in a human body”) and performance were an attempt to process her sexual assault, and anything but a random provocation. No one seemed to be listening, and the overall rejection of Artpop altered the course of Gaga’s career. “Yeah, very impactful,” she says. “Like, much more impactful than any other criticism for any artwork. That was hard.… That was the first time that I ever had major criticism about a piece of work that I’d made.”

IN EARLY OCTOBER, on a brief break from the tour, Gaga is back where Mayhem began. She’s perched on a black leather chair in a tranquil live room in Los Angeles’ the Village studio — today’s outfit is an oversize black blazer over a Social Distortion T-shirt and knee-high leather boots with three-inch heels. She’s getting over a cold, but her eyes are bright. The tour is, for once, living up to her vision for it, and she just won Artist of the Year at the VMAs. “I have played a lot of shows,” she says. “I feel pretty good.”

Sometime in 2023, Gaga sat at the Steinway piano in the corner of this very room and began to write what became the first track recorded for Mayhem, the swaggering love song “Vanish Into You,” with producer Andrew Watt. They met in another studio a few months earlier, when Watt was working on the Rolling Stones’ Grammy-winning Hackney Diamonds. She was nearby, recording some Joker-related music, and Mick Jagger invited her in while they were laying down an unusually strong gospel-y ballad, “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” with Stevie Wonder sitting in on keyboards, no less. Watt summoned the nerve to put a microphone in her hand, and within minutes, the song became a duet.

“She came into the live room,” says Watt, “and it was the first time I ever got to witness in person, besides seeing her concerts, the absolute fearlessness that she has. Yes, she’s Lady Fucking Gaga, but they’re the Rolling Fucking Stones, you know? And Stevie Fucking Wonder. It’s a song she’s only heard twice. Mick hands her the lyrics, and then she just starts vibing off them.”

Gaga and Polansky stayed in touch with Watt, and brought him in when she felt ready to begin recording her own album — the trio ended up executive-producing it together. As “Vanish Into You” developed, Watt suggested adding the producer/drum programmer Cirkut to the process, and they all began a year of close collaboration. In the process, Gaga finally steered back into the center of her artistic lane, after years of productive detours that she traces directly to the Artpop aftermath.

“I put so much into Artpop,” Gaga says. “It really was my EDM opus. And also I was in a very chaotic place. It feels hard sometimes to stand firmly in the ground when it’s sinking, you know?” The album, and her choices around it, refused to give people what they expected. “People don’t like it if I say, ‘I won’t dress the way you want me to dress. I won’t have the hair you want me to have, and I’m going to not make pop music the way that you want me to make it. ’Cause you want everything to sound like “Bad Romance,” and I’m never doing that again.’”

The sexism within the response is, in hindsight, obvious to Gaga. When male artists refuse to repeat themselves, she points out, they’re celebrated as visionaries, “radical thinkers discovering new territory,” who don’t “need to adhere to the laurels of their previous success.” Instead, “I was sort of heralded as, like, over.” She was, at the time, all of 27 years old.

In her mind, the world was treating her like a product, not an artist. “It was every angle in every room of every place I went,” she says. “Pro­duct, object, business. ‘What can you get her to do? Will she do this? Can you get her to do this?’ Once I became a huge business for people, their priority was not making sure that I had a dignified artistic experience. It was to make sure that I could earn money as fast as possible.… There came a time in my life where I would enter rooms, and there were no instruments anymore. It was about trying to control me to be a piece of a business.”

So she simply slipped out of that world, gliding into “ancillary departments,” with some initial help from the likes of Tony Bennett and Bradley Cooper. “Part of the way I’ve taken myself out of the conversation when it’s difficult,” she says, “is by paving my own path.… I kept creating spaces where I could be in control. ‘Maybe if I do this, I won’t be an object.’”

And as she sees it, she needed all of those detours. “Mayhem as a piece of music, I never would’ve made it without the 10 years of experience that I had,” she says. “Nearly 30, if you count all my years of music. What would Mayhem sound like if I hadn’t become a jazz singer? What would it have sounded like if I hadn’t made Artpop?”

2020’s Chromatica, her first attempt at a return to pop, had some genuinely great songs, including “911,” a bracingly direct reference to the antipsychotics she was taking. (She’s since cut down on her meds: “I’m on some, yeah, but not as many. I weaned off of a lot of them.”) She still loves that album, but now sees it as a sort of half-measure, a transitional moment.

“Chromatica was very literal because that’s all I had,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of the same type of poetry inside of me because I sort of lost it. And I actually think that was true for Joanne as well. But it’s almost like if someone were to say, ‘How do you feel?’ and you refuse to give an artistic response, you just go, ‘I feel like shit.’ … The spirit of Chromatica was to be hopeful when you’re not.”

Mayhem came from a very different Gaga. “I was willingly and openly running through all the nightmares of my past and my present and just finding poetry in all of it,” she says. “And that was a sign of my health as a musician. One of the things I’m most grateful for is gaining all my artistic faculties back to make this record. I had to dig very, very deep, and I had to change a lot of my life and recenter around what I needed as a human being.”

“He Wanted To Take Care 
of Me. I’ve Never Been Loved That Way”

ONE DAY IN 2024, Michael Polansky proposed marriage by wrapping a strand of grass around Gaga’s finger in their backyard, as recounted in her song “Blade of Grass.” At some point, though, he upgraded. In the L.A. studio, there’s a diamond nearly the size of a newborn’s fist on Gaga’s ring finger. “I have the blade of grass,” she promises. “I’m just not wearing it today!”

When he happened to meet Gaga’s mom at a fundraiser in late 2019, Polansky never imagined marrying, or even going on a single date with, a pop star. “When her mom first started telling me she wanted to set me up with her daughter,” says Polansky, who grew up in Minnesota, “I thought she had to have been joking, because nobody in my life would’ve thought of me as somebody who wanted to get attention.”

A lyric she wrote about him addressed that incongruity: “How does a man like me love a woman like you?” Or as Polansky puts it, “How could somebody who is so shy and wants so much privacy love someone that would cause his life to become the exact opposite of everything he thought he wanted?” To make it all make sense, he too would have to evolve.

“My mom thought we would be a good match,” Gaga says, “or that at least I would be enamored with him.” Her mother made a point of adding, “Stefani, he’s a very serious guy.” Telling this story now, Gaga can’t quite get the words out. She chokes up, and begins to weep. “Sorry,” she says. “It’s so special to look back on that, because so many people in my life at that time were looking for a good time. People really loved Drunk Lady Gaga.” She knew that with Polansky, “none of my tricks were gonna work on him. We were gonna meet each other and probably have a very sincere adult conversation and see if we liked each other. Michael’s sense of gravity might be the thing that I was attracted to about him the most. He immediately understood how serious things were for me.”

In the past, she acknowledges, daddy issues led her to some bad choices in men. “My dad’s kind of a tough guy,” she said. (When I first met him, he poked me in the chest and said, of my impending article, “Keep it clean.”) “My dad was more how I was — live-fast, die-young mentality. He’s reformed now. He’s changed a lot. So I think I was at­­tracted to that when I was younger. But this was very different.”

As Gaga’s new relationship deepened, in fact, she thinks her father felt relief for the first time since he saw her set a club stage on fire with hairspray as a teenager. “I think he was always really worried about me,” she says. “He doesn’t feel like he has to worry about me anymore. Which is a nice feeling, to know my dad can have some rest with that.” They’re close despite political differences — her dad is an outspoken conservative and Trump supporter, and Gaga is a longtime Democrat who sang the national anthem at Joe Biden’s inauguration. “I just try to focus on my relationship with my dad outside of what we don’t agree about,” she says. “As everyone knows, that is hard. We’re a family, just like all families.”

When she met Polansky, she was finishing Chromatica, an album purportedly about healing. She was actually in rough shape. “I was smoking three packs of cigarettes, sitting on the porch all day,” she says. She was about to do Chro­matica interviews explaining what a great place she was in, but in reality, “I was as great as I could be for someone that smoked weed all day, knocked back a couple bottles of wine, and passed out.”

The more dramatic crises of 2017 or so had passed, but even by the time she shot House of Gucci in early 2021, she was feeling unstable — her references at the time to a psychiatric nurse on set had less to do with the rigors of the role than her ongoing issues. “I don’t think I was doing very well during that film at all,” she says.

Covid-19 hit just weeks after the couple met. “She put Chromatica out early, but had to cancel every touring plan and performance plan,” Polansky recalls. “So I actually got her as Stefani from the very beginning.” But what Polansky saw in her when they met worried him. “The piece that I always noticed was how disempowered she felt,” he says. “Not in charge of her own life. I’d never met somebody so incredibly talented and gifted feel so disempowered.” He watched her sit down at the piano to write and start crying.

“What he saw was, this is somebody that feels very far away from what they’re supposed to be doing,” she says. “He wanted to take care of me. And I’ve never been loved that way. My life was serious to him. It was not a party. He helped me see that my life was precious.”

Polansky told her she needed to reclaim her music, and in turn, she asked for his help. “Because it was music, it sort of ended up with me helping her make music,” he says. “The way I think about it, if she had wanted to open an Italian restaurant, I would’ve learned how to make pasta. It was never about music. It just sort of ended up there.”

She’d ask for Polansky’s opinion, and he found himself making lyrical and musical suggestions. “There’s a whole bunch of lyrics in the album that I wrote, not intentionally. We were texting each other, and I was like, ‘Oh, what about this?’” Polansky says. “And then it ends up in the song.” He was surprised to learn she had given him songwriting credits, as were some fans. “It was very touching to me that she wanted to acknowledge me,” he says. “I do think it ended up maybe being a little bit more confusing to people from the outside looking in than we would’ve expected it to be.”

The Mayhem sessions were long, and often emotionally intense. “There were many times where she would sing a vocal for a song and it would bring me to tears, and then she would also be in tears,” says Watt, who credits Polansky with a crucial stabilizing role in the process. “Michael’s just so amazing because he’s so levelheaded. We could all be so eccentric and excited and jumping up and down and diving into the art. And then he would be like the great leveler. He’d be like, ‘Nah, I don’t like that song as much as I liked that other song.’ He had that all-knowing Buddha-type energy.”

From there, Gaga and her fiancé ended up working together on every aspect of the tour planning. “Imagine two best friends just moving through life, but we’re always being creative,” Gaga says.

The partnership goes both ways. There’s a skin-health research firm near Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Outer Biosciences, with 20 employees, that was secretly co-founded by one of the most famous women in the world. “It was her idea,” says Polansky. She’s officially on the board of directors, but they’ve kept her name out of it, until now. “The attention that Stefani’s involvement would bring — it wasn’t necessary. It’s not consumer-facing. It’s a research company.… My work is not public in the same way. When she talks about us being partners, it kind of looks like it all goes one direction, but she’s the most incredible support to me as well.”

They’re planning on getting married soon, either during the tour or just after. “We’re talking about it all the time,” Polansky tells me. “We have these breaks, and they’re tempting. It’s like, ‘OK, can we get married that weekend?’ We don’t want a really big wedding, but we want to enjoy it. In a lot of ways, we already feel married, so it’s not like it’s gonna change much.”

They’re clear that parenthood is next, and Polansky is inspired by Elton John and David Furnish, whose kids are Gaga’s godsons. “Their kids have turned out to be very happy. The most important thing is making it feel like this is just our family, this is what we do. Her being Lady Gaga and the art and all of it is not something that she has to compartmentalize away from her relationship with me or when she’s a mother.”

“Being a mom is the thing I want the most,” Gaga says. “And he’s gonna be a beautiful father. We’re really excited about that.”

I suddenly remember something she said to me over dinner when she was 23 years old, with a single album to her name. She’d be fully Lady Gaga forever, she vowed, “even when I have a baby one day.”

She looks me in the eyes. “I lied,” she says, and laughs so hard that the heels of her platform boots nearly leave the floor. She says it again, looking as unburdened as I’ve ever seen her. “I lied! I’ve grown up since I said that.”