“The album was assembled over almost two years, “the way that they made old, old records,” with Gaga personally writing more than 100 songs before winnowing them down. “I listened to each over and over,” she says. “And then I made them perfect. And I’m still making them perfect. And I’ll make them perfect every single day until they pry it out of my bleeding fingers.” The Hausmates sit cross-legged on the floor in what appears to be breathless anticipation while I join Gaga, her finger hovering over an iPod, on a pale, Pepto-pink couch. She presses Play. The room vibrates with the operatic “Applause,” a dance floor-rattling barn burner designed, she tells me, to sound like an adrenaline rush. “Give me that thing that I want / Give me that thing that I love,” sings Gaga the voice, while Gaga the woman sways around the room, all eyes on her. “I have something I think no other artist has,” she tells me. “I really, truly believe that there’s a certain kind of applause…when fans clap for you to keep going.” On tour, she swears the fans in the concert pit, close enough to register the pain on her face, mouthed to her, Are you okay? “They knew. I’m telling you,” she says. “Those kids, when they put their hands up and make ‘em touch, they give me the thing that I need.” Gaga has always been fueled by a kind of creative fury - at conventionalism, at discrimination against the outsides, particularly gay teens, whom she champions. As she plays track after track, those emotions begin to surface. During “Swine” - a fierce dub-step cut with the lyric “You’re just a pig inside a human body,” she’s so in the moment that she furiously throws a wine glass at a wall and dances between the shards while the Haus laughs and cheers her on. These days, it’s clear she’s raging, at least in part, at critics who question her authenticity of the early struggles - bullied in school; teenager depression; years of pounding the pavement in search of success - that make her believers feel so symbiotically connected to her. “Everyone is so cynical - that I can’t even purely love my fans, or even share an honest story about my past, without someone asking me if I really, truly struggled,” she says. “Do you know how much dirt I ate? Do you know the men I had to crawl through, the people that disrespected my body, my mind, my heart?” On tour, the fans “were the only thing that kept me going, because I told them to keep going.”
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