Lady GaGa Quick News

LADY GAGA IN V MAGAZINE #64

Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper look absolutely gorgeous in the upcoming 64th issue of V Magazine, available on newsstands next month! Click the picture above to view the photos by Ellen von Unwerth!

LADY GAGA TO TALK LIVE FOR MAC VIVA GLAM

On Monday, Sharon Osbourne will be joined by MAC AIDS Fund spokespersons Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper for an intimate and exclusive “audience with” in London, as part of the MAC Cosmetics Viva Glam “From our Lips” campaign. The exclusive interview will offer fans from around the world the opportunity to have their questions about HIV/AIDS and their participation with the MAC Viva Glam campaign answered by Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper. MAC also has partnered exclusively with Ustream to broadcast the event to a global audience via the MAC Facebook page immediately following the event 4 PM GMT / 11 AM EST / 8 AM PST. Led by Sharon Osbourne, the lively and candid conversation will see Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper discuss HIV and AIDS, raising awareness around the subject to get people across the globe to think and act differently about the disease.

Source: Interscope.com

LADY GAGA TO APPEAR ON FRIDAY NIGHT WITH JONATHAN ROSS

Lady Gaga is scheduled to appear on “Friday Night With Jonathan Ross” in the UK for a performance of two songs and an interview! The episode will air on Friday, March 5 at 10:35 PM on BBC1. LadyGaga.co.uk is giving away two tickets to attend the recording of the episode on Tuesday, March 2! Click here to enter!

PAINTED LADIES – LADY GAGA AND CYNDI LAUPER

NYTimes.com – Barely discernible makeup may be the beauty trend du jour, but those mavens of maquillage Cyndi Lauper and Lady Gaga never got the memo. “I have a huge suitcase full of the stuff,” said Lauper, who is composing the music for the coming Broadway adaptation of the movie “Kinky Boots.” “I am just sorry I only have one face to put it all on.” It’s an addiction shared by her stylistic heiress. “I am a glamour girl through and through,” Lady Gaga said. “See,” she added, pointing to welts on her left arm, “I burned myself with a curling iron. Glamour, girl!” Little wonder, then, that M.A.C. has tapped them to be the latest mouthpieces for its VIVA Glam campaign. In addition to appearing in the company’s new advertisements, they have each created a lipstick. (Lauper’s is a light coral red, and Gaga’s is a bubble-gum pink; $14). All proceeds go to the M.A.C. AIDS fund. Who said glamour was only for the shallow? Check back next Thursday and Friday for exclusive full-length interviews with Cyndi Lauper and Lady Gaga.

ROB FUSARI TALKS GAGA

Producer, Rob Fusari recently sat down with Billboard to discuss how he came to work with GaGa, her drop from Def Jam, and more. Check it out: How did you come to work with Lady Gaga? In 2006, I got a call late one evening from a songwriter named Wendy Starland. I was into the Strokes at that time, and I’d told Wendy I was looking for a female artist to make a Strokes-type record. I answered the phone, and Wendy said, “I may have found your girl.” She was at a club in New York, where this girl, Stefani Germanotta, had just performed a showcase. Stefani gets on the phone with her mousey little voice-”Hiiii,” real bubbly-and it sounded like she was starting to get buzzed. So I said, “I heard you rocked it . . . can you come up to Jersey on Monday and meet me at my studio?” Next week comes and I figure there’s no way this girl is going to show up. She was supposedly taking a bus from New York that would put her in Livingston at 8:40. Eighty-thirty rolls around, and I drive down to the pizzeria near the bus stop to grab a slice, and sure enough, I see this girl who does not belong in this pizzeria or in this town, and she’s asking for directions. I’m thinking to myself, “Please tell me this is not her,” because this is not the Strokes girl I’d envisioned. What did she look like? Like a guidette. Totally “Jersey Shore.” [laughs] Anyway, we ride back to the studio, and I’m plotting how to cut this short. I can’t picture going to a label with this girl. We arrive, and she sits down at the piano and starts playing a song about Hollywood she’d written. And I tell you, in 20 seconds, I’m like, “Oh, my God. If I can handle my business, this girl is going to change my life.” I said, “You’ve got to come up here next week, and we have to start working.” And she did. She took the bus to my studio every day for a year straight, no exaggeration. What kind of deal did you and Stefani strike? We started a company together called Team Love Child. It’s not a production deal. She was never signed to me. It’s me, her and her dad in this company. Everyone was on the same plane. And I’m all for that. How would you describe her musical identity at this point? She had a big Gwen Stefani/No Doubt thing going on. Some Fiona Apple, some Beatles. No club beats, no disco performance art? No. She was anti all that. She would go to festivals like Bonnaroo. We started to make a very heavy rock record. Hard and grungy. But after three or four songs it seemed we were going down the wrong road. Then, one day, I read an article in the New York Times about Nelly Furtado and how she’d abandoned her folk-rock thing and made a dance record with Timbaland. My antenna went up. I said, “Stef, take a look at this. I’m really an R&B guy. I never produced a rock record in my life. I don’t know, you think maybe we should shift gears?” She kicked and screamed: “No! No! I love what we’re doing. We’re not changing it.” I’m like, “Stef, just try this. Let’s at least abandon the live drums and some of the guitars.” I finally got her to agree, and that day we did “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” which was me sitting at an MPC drum machine and Stef playing her piano riff. When did labels get interested? “Dirty, Rich” opened the floodgates. At the time I was managed by New Heights Entertainment. I gave them a copy of the new tracks we’d done, and soon everybody wanted to meet her. Everybody. We did the Nobu thing with Charlie Walk. Josh Sarubin at Def Jam invited her in. They had an upright piano there, and there’s maybe five or six people in the meeting. Karen Kwak, Josh . . . But not L.A. Reid. Stef sits down and starts to play “Wonderful,” the first song we wrote together, and I guess they have some system that when somebody’s really good, L.A. gets a secret Bat signal to come in. So he enters as she’s playing and by the end he’s enamored. He looks at her and says, “Before you leave the building, you have to stop down in legal and sign my contract.” That’s a pretty high-pressure sales job. Totally. After he left, she and I looked at each other like, “What does he mean, ’stop down in legal’? Is he going to give us souvenirs?” She didn’t sign that day, but after she saw the rest of the labels, she signed with him. And three or four months after he got her, he wouldn’t give her the time of day. She’d want to sit in a room with him and talk about her music, and he just wouldn’t do it. We still don’t know why. In January 2008, I landed in San Francisco and there were 27 messages on my cell. I’m like, “Ooh. That’s either really good or really bad.” And of course it’s Stefani calling and she’s hysterical: “You’ve got to fly back. L.A.’s dropping me.” My heart fell out of my body. What was next? Well, at this point, I wanted her to spread her wings. My manager at New Heights was now managing Stef, and they also represented [producer] RedOne, so it seemed like a good idea to have her work with other people. And you felt good about that? You didn’t feel protective? Well, of course I did. It was my baby. But I knew if I tried to hold her back, she’d run for the hills. She and RedOne did some amazing stuff together: “Boys Boys Boys,” then “Just Dance.” Meanwhile, she and New Heights were trying to shop another deal. And everybody’s turning them down. Everybody, including the people that wanted her before. She’s damaged goods. At that point, I decide to step in and help. So I make a call, to Vince Herbert. I didn’t even know that he had a label deal with Interscope. So Vince checks out Gaga’s MySpace page and calls me back that night: “I’m sending two tickets for you and her to come out to meet Jimmy Iovine. I want to sign her.” We get on the plane, go to L.A., go into Interscope. First meeting, Jimmy doesn’t show up. Come back the next day. Jimmy doesn’t show again. They send us home. Stef is very disappointed. I’m like, “This business is going to kill me.” First she got dropped, now Jimmy doesn’t show. Finally, a week or two later, we get a call to come back out. Jimmy’s there. It’s me, Vince, Jimmy and Stef. Very casual meeting. Jimmy hasJohn Lennon’s Mellotron in his office. He’s on the phone with Mick Jagger, trying to find some lost tapes of Mick and John or some shit. It’s very impressive, obviously. Anyway, he listens to a little bit of “Dirty, Rich” and to another record Stef and I did called “Sexy Ugly.” He stands up, looks at Vince and says, “Let’s give it a try.” And that was it. She got a deal. Had you and Stefani written “Paparazzi” yet? No. “Paparazzi” was one of the last songs we did together. I told Stef that to this day that when I hear “Paparazzi,” there’s something very sad about it, even though it’s not a sad melody or a sad lyric. Maybe it’s just me being sentimental. Are you and Stefani still friends? I don’t know. I feel like I may have been demoted to . . . what would be one level beneath friend? Professional acquaintance? Yeah, there you go. That’s it. What do you think happened? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out and I won’t ask. I don’t know if I said something or did something. I don’t know. Will you be involved in her next record? I don’t believe so. Well, either way, you must be glad to be out of your mom’s house. Definitely. I feel a huge sense of accomplishment that we built something together, and I’m extremely happy for her. We spoke briefly after the Grammys, and I congratulated her and she congratulated me.