Lady Gaga Tearfully Discusses Drawbacks Of Fame
By Annie Reuter
(RADIO.COM) – Lady Gaga has released her most honest album yet with her fourth #1 record, Joanne, and the singer opened up about the new project and the drawbacks of fame in an emotional interview with CBS Sunday Morning.
Gaga sat down with CBS' Lee Cowan at her family's restaurant in New York for an interview after a stroll through Central Park where she paid her respects to John Lennon while singing "Strawberry Fields Forever" at the Strawberry Fields memorial. While going anywhere with Gaga is an event, Cowan noted that these days there is more "lady" in Lady Gaga.
"I'm growing up. I'm 30. This is what I want to do now," Gaga responded, while discussing her more mature project, Joanne. "There was a lot of crying, a lot of pain, a lot of learning about myself."
She further explained the reasoning behind her dive bar tour, stating that if she never became successful she would have been happy playing dive bars for her entire career.
"There's something so fantastic and wonderful and humbling about being in a dive bar where I started making music and being able to sing this music up close and personal to the fans and looking them in the eye the first time they hear it," she said. "It reminds me that if this were to all go away tomorrow — all the big success — that I would still be very happy going bar from bar playing music for people."
But she admitted that her big success has had an impact on her day-to-day life where the moment Gaga leaves her home she realizes that she is no longer Stefani Germanotta, and instead must portray the persona of Lady Gaga.
"I'm very acutely aware that once I cross that property line, I'm not free anymore," she said. "As soon as I go out into the world, I belong, in a way, to everyone else. It's legal to follow me. It's legal to stalk me at the beach. And I can't call the police or ask them to leave. And I took a long, hard look at that property line, and I said, 'Well, if I can't be free out there, I can be free in here (points to her heart).'"
Then Gaga teared up and added that she misses being able to go anywhere at any time to meet a friend for a conversation.
While fame has its drawbacks, the one thing that remains constant for Lady Gaga is her family. She says that will always be her gauge of success.
"[There's] nothing better than walking into your dad's restaurant and seeing a smile on his face and knowing that your mom and dad and sister are real proud of you and that you haven't lost touch with who you are. That for me is real success," she said.
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