Lady Gaga on “Deep Experience” With Her ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Character That Inspired ‘Harlequin’ Album

Lady Gaga is opening up about the inspiration behind her Joker: Folie à Deux companion album titled Harlequin .

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The actress-singer recently spoke to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 about finding a balance between herself and her character Lee, aka Harley Quinn , for the album, which will be released Friday and include 13 tracks.

“I think that for me, this idea of dual identities was always something that was a part of my music-making,” Gaga explained. “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.”

The “Shallow” artist added that her Joker: Folie à Deux character is 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.'”

Gaga announced Harlequin earlier this week after teasing fans for weeks about a surprise project. In a tracklist preview, Spotify also shared the names of the album’s songs, including “Good Morning,” “Get Happy (2024),” “Oh, When the Saints,” “World on a String,” “That’s Entertainment,” “Smile,” “The Joker” and “Folie à Deux,” among others.

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Lowe also noted that the album, which he described as LG 6.5, meaning “half Gaga and half Lee,” not only sounds “really, really fun,” but also “really free.”

“Yeah, it was really fun,” Gaga responded. “It was completely freeing because calling it LG 6.5, it’s kind of not beholden to pop music or pop culture in the same way that some of my other releases might be. And it kind of gave it a freedom in that way.”

Todd Phillips’ upcoming Joker musical sequel , which sees Gaga star opposite Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, opens in theaters Oct. 4.

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