Lady Gaga reveals ‘Die With A Smile’ with Bruno Mars is “huge part” of new album

Lady Gaga’s duet with Bruno Mars, ‘Die With A Smile’, is set to be a large part of her upcoming album.

• READ MORE: ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ review: Lady Gaga shines in a provocative prison musical

The singer first teased her as-yet-untitled seventh solo studio album back in October, two months after dropping the Mars collab.

Initially, the track – which has received Grammy nominations for Song of the Year and Best Pop/Duo Group Performance, was promoted as a standalone single, but Gaga told the L.A. Times in a new interview that it’s going to be part of the album, out in February, after all.

“It’s a huge part of my album,” shared Gaga, real name Stefani Germanotta. “It was like this missing piece. When asked if the track is connected to her movie Joker: Folie à Deux, or the companion album ‘Harlequin’, the star replied: “I don’t think so. I mean, this was not meant to be for that. But that was happening in my life at the time we wrote it and made it, so it’s hard to say no entirely because these things always ricochet off each other.

She continued: “I do think that the humour we found in the video must have been something that was bouncing around inside me – this idea of a sad story that has some comedy. Singing about dying is not something you would associate with smiling, but somehow it all makes sense when you think about the sweetness of what we’re trying to say.”

Gaga explained that the song came about after she and Mars had been talking about working together when he called her and said he had an idea. “I really wanted to hear what he was doing, so I went over there really late and he played me the start of this idea,” she said. “He had a couple different ideas, but I said, ‘This one is a love song — I think people would love to hear us do a love song.’”

She said it was the lyrics that grabbed her, and felt the song was something “people needed to hear”: “I write music all the time, and sometimes you feel like you’re making something that some people will like. But there’s other times that you work on something and you just know it’s gonna deeply speak to all different kinds of people. I knew it right away.”

Explaining that they recorded her part together, she said she wanted the harmonies to be “super ‘70s,” and said she had the collaborations between Carole King and James Taylor in mind, before adding: “I think ‘Die With a Smile’ is a unique song in a way in 2024. We’re saying some shit that’s maybe not happening on every record.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Gaga described the album as being “full of my love of music,” with multiple genres and styles. She said: “It leaps around genre in a way that’s almost corrupt. And it ends with love. That’s the answer to all the chaos in my life is that I find peace with love. Every song that I wrote, I just kept getting kind of swept away in these different dreams I was having about the past — almost like a recollection of all these bad decisions that I made in my life. But it ends in this very happy place.”

She also looked towards her headline slot at Coachella 2025, revealing that she’s putting together a visual representation of the album to showcase at the festival, and discussed her 2017 headline slot – which came about after Beyoncé pulled out due to pregnancy.

Gaga explained: “I didn’t have the time to totally do what I really wanted to do… I did it, and I loved it. But you know when you have a vision in your mind of how you want to do something? It’s time to make it happen.”

As well as ‘Die With A Smile’, Gaga has already shared the single ‘Disease’ from her upcoming album. She said earlier this month that the song “felt like a way into the chaos of the album, which is kind of exercises in chaos – different sides of who I am as a person.”

Gaga’s last album, aside from the Joker 2 soundtrack and the ‘Harlequin’ companion album, was 2021’s ‘Love For Sale’ with the late crooner Tony Bennett, a close friend of the singer.

Her most recent solo LP was 2020’s ‘Chromatica’, which NME gave a four-star review, writing: “On ‘Chromatica’ Gaga has fully embraced creating a pure pop album. The record is littered with catchy choruses and glossy production – but it goes deeper than that. ‘Chromatica’ is “about healing and it’s about bravery”, she explained before the album came out, adding: “sound is what healed me in my life period, and it healed me again making this record”. You can certainly hear that. From the exhilarating melodies to the positive, hope-filled lyrics, ‘Chromatica’ is a celebration – and a well-deserved one at that.”

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