The 30-year-old singer says maintaining her persona 'took a toll' on her body.
Lady Gaga is giving the world a little more of Joanne.
The 30-year-old singer debuted her latest single, "A-Yo," on Tuesday, and while the song is anything but depressing, Gaga admits the album comes from a place of "pain."
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Listen to the new track below:
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"You know, I really hate to say it, but I'm better in pain. I hate to say it. It's awful… because it hurts," Gaga revealed in an interview on Sirius XM's Volume channel on Monday. "There is a lot of pain in the record. I wouldn't say that it's necessarily thematically painful the whole way through, because it's quite a fun album as well. The pain is in my voice."
"I don't know how to explain it. I don't want to cry on-air, it's so embarrassing," she continued. "But I just remember that my mom, when she first heard a couple of the songs on the album, she just looked at me, and she was just crying."
"I said, 'What's wrong?' and she just said, 'Nothing, it's so good, and I don't want you to take this the wrong way, because it's not a bad thing, but your voice just sounds different.' And I said, 'What's different?' and she just said, 'I can just hear that you're in some emotional pain,'" Gaga revealed.
While the "Perfect Illusion" singer didn't specify the cause of her pain, she did open up on how fame has taken a toll on her.
"I don't write about fame anymore -- or not on this record -- because it's something I had to, like, erase from my body. It does [take a toll] and it did," she confessed, adding that while maintaining her persona was exhausting, she doesn't have any regrets.
"That's exactly what I wanted to say and do, and during my live shows in the future, I hope to still convey that feeling at certain points. I love that about music, where you just watch and experience an artist, and you're just like, 'That's impossible,'" she shared. "But also, you know, fame is so alienating, and it's so toxic for the creative process, for me, because I need human connection in order to write music."
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"If I go to a bar, or to the grocery store, or wherever, and I try to talk to somebody, and the whole time they're screaming or trying to take a picture, I can't get to know them. I can't ask them a question. I can't learn about their life or share something about mine," she explained. "I don't get asked very often, you know, super deep things about myself, and that's hard. And it's scary, really scary. Because you just feel like, 'Will I ever, ever again talk to somebody, and have them see me as a person?'"
"[With Joanne, I was able to] put myself back in that place where I am just a human being, and I realized that all that emotional pain that's in my voice now, all that trauma from my life, all the loss…those are the things that connect me to people," Gaga said. "It's actually not these images, or social media, or my fame at all. You know, the thing that really makes me connected to my fans and to the world is what I've been through as a human, so I had to put that in this record."
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