Review: Lady Gaga's 'Joanne' is a revealing triumph
Joanne isn’t Lady Gaga’s country album. But perhaps it should’ve been.
Fans already knew that Gaga's fifth studio album, out Friday, would be a departure. In between the release of her last proper pop album, Artpop, and now, she's undergone a complete public-image makeover, changing the way fans hear (teaming up with Tony Bennett to record a jazz album) and see (trading her red-carpet meat dresses for classic Hollywood glam) the chameleonic star.
Joanne still bears traces of Gaga's hit-making past, and is being marketed as such, in lead singles Perfect Illusion and A-YO. But the rest of the album tells a different story, one of an artist stripping away the theatrics that have accompanied the rest of her releases for a collection of songs colored by country and western, invoking the genre's familiar specters of trouble-causing cowboys, independent women and God.
The album gambles that listeners care as much about Gaga the artist as Gaga the spectacle. And her gamble pays off, in the most sonically varied, emotionally honest album of her career.
To speak in the language of 2016’s other big-name pop releases, the singer has always been more of a Lemonade artist, crafting a unified aesthetic around whatever direction she’s pursuing at the time, from Artpop’s neon circus to her Tony Bennett-assisted vintage jazz period.
Joanne is more akin to Rihanna’s Anti, adventurous yet slightly scattered, showing an artist expanding her artistic vision and toying with different genres, while still recording the customary pop tracks listeners have come to expect.
It’s a testament to the strength of Joanne’s vision that the songs that sound most like Gaga’s earlier hits, from Perfect Illusion and A-YO to the Beck-cowritten Dancin' in Circles, are its weakest moments. Gaga proves she can still make pop songs that fit Joanne’s twangier direction, nailing the balance on opening track Diamond Heart and the Josh Homme-assisted John Wayne, stadium-sized tracks that sound written with her huge Super Bowl halftime stage in mind.
The album’s quieter tracks are among Gaga’s most honest performances to date, her voice simple and human-sounding without the trademark theatrical pronunciations she’s adopted over the years.
No song better illustrates Gaga’s newly-realized potential than the title track, in which she adopts a classic-folk twang to sing a heartbreaking love letter to her aunt, sounding like a completely different artist than the one behind Poker Face and Bad Romance.
And when the old Gaga returns on Joanne’s poppier moments, bending the word “love” beyond recognition on Perfect Illusion, it's not quite as thrilling, now that we know the power of Gaga’s own voice.
Want to imagine what Joanne would sound like with just its folksier tracks? Enjoy: