Lady Gaga Describes Creating Her Stage Persona As a Kind of Armor: ‘Stefani Is Me… Lady Gaga Is My Creation’

Lady Gaga had a batch connected her caput earlier this period erstwhile she sat down with Late Show big Stephen Colbert for an expansive interrogation astatine the storied Bitter End venue successful New York’s Greenwich Village, wherever then-unknown Stefani Germanotta archetypal performed arsenic her present world-famous change ego successful 2005.

Wearing each black, including a achromatic hood and knee-high achromatic boots, Gaga reminisced astir the archetypal clip she performed astatine the venue arsenic a 14-year-old, marveling astatine the representation of the location unit helping retired by tuning the soft — which was connected the signifier conscionable implicit Colbert’s enarthrosis — and playing the venue regularly for the adjacent 3 years nether her commencement sanction portion showing disconnected vintage flyers from those days that her parent had kept.

Another captious keepsake from the aboriginal days of her Gaga epoch was a representation of a clipboard she would walk astir astatine shows asking attendees if they’d enjoyed the show and asking for their names and emails, arsenic good a a representation of a “hit list” she’d written up aboriginal connected of grounds labels she dreamed of being on. Gaga said it was “a mates years” betwixt erstwhile she made that privation database doodle and erstwhile she signed her archetypal grounds deal, sharing a representation of her astatine 19 holding a sheaf of papers successful beforehand of a partition of golden records wearing a not-very-Gaga ensemble of achromatic strappy sandals, a reddish skirt and a grey vessel apical with achromatic suspenders.

While she wasn’t the Gaga we cognize present backmost then, the vocalist said that creating her show persona was a mode for her to “become thing that I felt I didn’t already person wrong of me. Sort of similar the prima I ever wanted to be. I knew I had philharmonic endowment and I had things I wanted to say.”

Gaga weighed successful connected was the quality betwixt Stefani and Gaga — “Stefani is me, the artist, the creator, and Lady Gaga is my creation” — with the vocalist saying that Gaga represented the benignant of prima she dreamed of being aft a puerility of heavy insecurity. Gaga said that her signifier persona was created aft immoderate “really unsmooth experiences” successful New York, some nonrecreational and personal, that were truthful challenging she felt she had to alteration her name.

“It was similar a caller beginning. But I created thing that felt breathtaking and artistic,” she said....