Lady Gaga has revealed that her newest album, Chromatica, gives her fans an honest look at a time when she severely struggled with depression and worked on loving herself again.
“My biggest enemy is Lady Gaga, that's what I was thinking. My biggest enemy is her,” the singer said on CBS Sunday Morning. “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 dinner with your family without it being about you, it’s always about you. All the time it's about you.”
On Chromatica, she opens up about her mental illness and trauma recovery. “There's not one song on that album that’s not true, not one,” she said. She used her song “911” as an example, saying that the lyric “Pop a 911” is a “reference to the medication I had to take when I used to panic because I'm Lady Gaga.”
When asked why that time of her life was so dark, Gaga said she had “totally gave up on [herself].” She added, “I hated being famous, I hated being a star, I felt exhausted and used up.”
“It's not always easy if you have mental issues to let other people see,” she continued. “I used to show, I used to self-harm, I used to say, ‘Look I cut myself, see I’m hurting.’ Because I didn’t think anyone could see because mental health, it’s invisible.”
Gaga added that she experienced suicidal thoughts daily. “I didn't really understand why I should live other than to be there for my family,” she shared. “That was an actual real thought and feeling, why should I stick around?” She explained that she lived in a house where people “watched” her for a couple of years to “make sure she was safe.”
She also revealed that her major trigger was “gentrification” and being approached in public: “If I'm at the grocery store and somebody comes up very close to me and puts a cellphone right in my face and starts taking pictures, just total panic, full-body pain. I'm braced because I'm so afraid,” she said. “It’s like I'm an object, I'm not a person.”
Still, Gaga continued making music. “This, I have to do it,” she explained while pointing at her piano. “Turns out, even if I don’t want to be alive, I still know how to write a song.”
Following Chromatica’s release, Gaga said she’s “found a way to love [herself] again.” She continued, “I don't hate Lady Gaga anymore. Now I look at this piano and I go, ‘Ugh, 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.’”
Elsewhere in the interview, she touched on how thankful she is for her friendship with Ariana Grande. “I love that girl,” Gaga said of Grande. “You know how hard it is to make a female friend in this business? In this business, having a female friend is like watching a pig fly.” The pair collaborated on the Chromatica album cut “Rain on Me,” which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart at the beginning of June.
