Hours after debuting her new single, “Perfect Illusion,” Lady Gaga revealed that her new album will feature a collaboration with Florence + The Machine’s Florence Welch.
“Me and Florence Welch did a duet together,” Gaga said while co-hosting BBC Radio 1’s Breakfast Show with Nick Grimshaw Friday. “I started to work on an idea for a song that I really wanted to do with a girl. You’ll see why when you see what the song is about.”
Of Welch, Gaga said, “She’s, if not the best, one of the greatest vocalists in the world.”
Gaga’s new album features collaborations with Beck, Father John Misty, and Josh Homme, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Mark Ronson – the three of of whom worked on “Perfect Illusion” with Bloodpop. When asked about working on the single, Gaga said she wrote lyrics for the track on a typewriter.
“I work on a typewriter and we would bounce new lyrics back and forth,” she said. “We stripped everything away. Changed the melody, shifted it. I sat at piano, Kevin was on guitar, Mark was on the bass.”
When asked about the meaning of the song, she said, “I believe many of us are wondering why there are so many fake things around us. How do we navigate through social media? How do we look through these images that we know are filtered and altered, and decipher what is reality and what is a perfect illusion? There are also a lot of things on the internet that are not reality. And I think people are pressured to keep that personal illusion going on in their real lives. So this song is about raging against it and letting it go. It’s about wanting people to re-establish that human connection.”
