Next week the musical/thriller Joker: Folie à Deux premieres in theaters and it stars Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel/Harley Quinn. In advance of its opening the idiosyncratic pop visionary has now shared its companion album titled Harlequin. Gaga announced the project only two days ago and previewed it yesterday with a video for “The Joker” that saw her giving Joker lips to the Mona Lisa. The album was co-executive produced by Gaga and her fiancé Michael Polansky.
Harlequin is not the highly anticipated follow-up to 2020’s Chromatica; she told AP that LP #7 is arriving in February and has promoted Harlequin as “LG 6.5.” It features mostly covers of standards that serve as the soundtrack to Joker: Folie à Deux, and several are billed as interpolations that find Gaga getting co-writing credits. Her version of the 1939 Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney song “Good Morning” also lists fiancé Polanski as a co-writer. There are brand new tracks too: “Happy Mistake,” which Gaga co-wrote with BloodPop, and “Folie à Deux.”
About the making of Harlequin, she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe:
I think that for me, this idea of dual identities was always something that was a part of my music making. I was always creating characters in my music and when I made Lee for Joker, she just really had this profound effect on me. The film had so much music in it, so much music that I love, and I was able to discover the character through the story, through the music that we did live every day as well as dance and the costumes and the makeup. So I kind of had this deep experience with the character and she just didn’t really leave me creatively and I decided I wanted to make a whole album inspired by her. She’s a really complex woman and I think, particularly as a woman in music and a female producer, it was really fun to go, “This album will be and I will be what I want, when I decide, whenever I feel like it. If I want it to be blues, it’ll be blues. If I want it to be funk, it’ll be funk. If I want it to be soul, it’ll be soul.”
“BloodPop and I had written this together and then I kind of took it to the next place,” she added about new song “Happy Mistake.” “One of the lyrics is, ‘I’m acting in this play of comedy with tragic words. The audience was smiling, cheering on a scene, absurd.’ I was thinking about when women play these broken characters in music or in films or theater, the audience loves it and they just cheer us on — they cheer on the image of the pain. It’s super confusing when the audience is going crazy and the artist is messed up. So that song is in a lot of ways about that.”
There was a fan listening party for the LP in Paris on Wednesday that Gaga popped into and she’ll next promote the album on Good Morning America (alongside Joaquin Phoenix) on Friday morning and on Graham Norton (alongside Demi Moore and Colin Farrell) on Friday night. On Tuesday night she’ll be on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.
Stream the album below.
@extra_tv Lady Gaga surprised 130 lucky fans in London with an exclusive listening party for “Harlequin,” her companion album to #JokerFolieADeux! 🃏🎶 (🎥: via Universal Music Group) #ladygaga #joker #jokermovie #joker2 #harlequin ♬ original sound – ExtraTV
