Lady Gaga’s latest album, Chromatica, comes out in just over a week. Ahead of then, Gaga sat down with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe for a wide-ranging conversation about the record. At one point, the pair spoke about Ariana Grande’s appearance on the album, and Gaga discussed what it was like to collaborate with the fellow pop superstar.
Gaga spoke about how they connected in the studio and how she pushed Grande on a creative level:
“Her and I connected right away and she was so wonderful. And I think maybe she assumed that it [would] be that she came in and I was like, ‘Here, just sing this and thank you so much for your time.’ Right? But instead, I asked her what she needed, how she wanted to do things. When we were vocally producing her, […] I was sitting at the console and talking to her. And then I remember I said to her, ‘OK, now everything that you care about while you sing, I want you to forget it and just sing. And by the way, while you’re doing that, I’m going to dance in front of you,’ because we had this huge big window. […] And she was like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God, I can’t, I can’t. I don’t know. Oh my God. Okay, okay.’ And then I did it and she sang, and she started to do things with her voice that were different. And it was the joy of two artists going, ‘I see you.'”
Gaga then revealed why at one point, she was “too ashamed to hang out” with Grande. The story starts with Gaga crying in the studio:
“She was like, ‘You’re going to be OK. Call me, here’s my number.’ And she was so persistent. She would try over and over again to be friends with me. And I was too ashamed to hang out with her, because I didn’t want to project all of this negativity onto something that was healing and so beautiful. And eventually she called me on my sh*t. She was, ‘You’re hiding.’ And I was like, ‘I am hiding. I’m totally hiding.’ And then this friendship blossomed.”
Find more from the interview here.
