Lady Gaga Explains How Her ‘Joker’ Character Inspired the Music of ‘Harlequin’

With the mystery of “LG 6.5” officially solved, Lady Gaga is ready to let fans in on the making of her newest album, Harlequin.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Gaga explained that the idea for her new album of jazz and pop classics came to her after she finished filming Joker: Folie à Deux. After performing for so long as her character Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (aka Harley Quinn), Gaga felt that she still had more to say. “I had such a deep relationship with Lee,” she said. “And when I was done filming the movie, I wasn’t done with her.”

As for why she teased the album as “LG 6.5,” the singer explained that she didn’t want fans to see this only as her next album. “It is my record. It’s a Lady Gaga record, but it’s also inspired by my character and my vision of what a woman can be,” she said. “It’s why the album does not adhere to one genre … it’s not my next studio album that’s a pop record, but it is somewhere in between, and it’s blurring the lines of pop music.”

The new project sees Gaga taking on a series of jazz standards — such as “Get Happy,” “World on a String” and “That’s Life” — much like she did in her Tony Bennett duet albums Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale. While Gaga says she struggled with not having her friend and collaborator in the studio with her following his death in 2023, she thinks he would have appreciated Harlequin for its shapeshifting nature.

“If I had put rock n’ roll chords over production in a record that I did with Tony years ago, I don’t know how he would’ve felt about that. Tony didn’t love rock n’ roll, but he would’ve said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing,'” she explained. “He was somebody who loved how risk-taking and different I am, and I always thought that was so cool. He was 60 years older than me, and he would flinch less than young people that I would meet … He was just a really compassionate, inclusive person. So he was definitely with us [in the studio], but he was mostly inside of me.”

As for fans still eager to hear what her long-awaited seventh studio album will sound like, Gaga remained tight-lipped, but offered a small hint. “The pop album is nothing like Chromatica. It’s a completely different record,” she said. “It’s meant to be ingested as a time in my life. And I’m also really excited about this idea that I don’t have to adhere to an era if I don’t want to. I can have a few going at once.”