Over the weekend, Lady Gaga released “Perfect Illusion,” the first single off her upcoming album, which is yet to be named and due this fall.
"They hashed out the lyrics for hours and hours," Michael "BloodPop" Tucker, a Justin Bieber and Grimes producer who worked with Gaga, Mark Ronson and Kevin Parker of Tame Impala on the session, told Rolling Stone. "They started around noon and the sun just went down and they went into the night. Every few days, a lyric would change and it'd get better and better.”
The upbeat, pop song came as a surprise to many fans after Gaga has been dedicating most of her time over the past three years to recording duets with Tony Bennett and giving her acting career a shot on FX’s “American Horror Story.”
Gaga also released a powerful single, “Till It Happens To You” nearly a year ago, for a documentary film “The Hunting Ground,” which deals with the longtime issue of campus rape in the United States.
While a surprise to fans, it raised the eyebrows of critics in the most pleasant way possible after her latest album, “ARTPOP” was a slight disappointment only selling 258,000 copies in its first week, Rolling Stone reports. This compares to “Born This Way” which sold more than 1.1 million copies in its debut week on the charts.
Tucker described the song to Rolling Stone as, “It’s soul-rooted and super-traditional songwriting. And rock. Yet it still has the heart of pop and dance.”
He also talked about how Gaga was an integral part of the song, always there writing at her typewriter with her guitar next to her.
“She's not at the back of the train; she's at the front, controlling the speed,” he said.
Gaga also surprised fans over the weekend with a live performance of “Perfect Illusion” to those lucky enough to be at The Moth in London during the early hours of Saturday morning.
Her performance was full of life and confidence, exactly what made the superstar famous in the first place.
Clad in a crop top tee and teeny silver shorts, she belted out the song with passion and ease. At the end, Gaga twirled the microphone above her head potentially alluding to her upcoming "Perfect Illusion” video.
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Tucker was most excited about how the song is, “totally non-derivative of anything on the radio right now — which I think is plaguing the radio a little bit like this song sounds like that song. ‘Perfect Illusion,’ you can't look at any song in the last five or 10 years and be like, ‘This sounds like that.’ It's its own thing.”
