Lady Gaga has opened up about her experiences working with jazz crooner Tony Bennett.
The 28-year-old ‘Paparazzi’ singer spoke to Parade magazine about recent problems in her personal life and credited Bennett with rescuing her career.
“I tell Tony every day that he saved my life,” said a teary-eyed Gaga, who gave a joint interview alongside Bennett.
“I’m not going to say any names, but people get irrational when it comes to money – with how they treat you, with what they expect from you,” she continued. “But if you help an artist, it doesn’t give you the right, once the artist is big, to take advantage of them…I was so sad. I couldn’t sleep. I felt dead. And then I spent a lot of time with Tony. He wanted nothing but my friendship and my voice.”
In July it was revealed that Gaga’s former personal assistant, Jennifer O’Neill, had signed a deal with Simon & Schuster imprint Atria Books to write a ‘tell-all’ about her former employer. O’Neill sued Gaga in 2011, claiming she was owed payment for 7,168 hours of overtime and was expected to work around the clock in anti-social conditions. The case was settled out of court last year.
Gaga and Bennett’s album is due for release on September 23 and will feature a variety of jazz standards including ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’, ‘Sophisticated Lady’, ‘Lush Life’, and the album’s title track ‘Cheek To Cheek’. The duo previously worked together on Bennett’s 2011 album ‘Duets II’, recording a version of ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’.
“When I came into this with Tony, he didn’t say, ‘You’ve got to take off all the crazy outfits and just sing’. He said, ‘Be yourself’,” Gaga recalled. “You know, people wrote a lot of things about my last album, ‘Artpop’, which was very controversial. If it didn’t grab the whole world the way ‘The Fame Monster’ did, that’s okay, because I know it’s good. That’s what Tony has taught me, that my intuition is right. When he talks about the 66 albums he’s put out, the peaks and valleys, and how it’s not about having a hit record – it’s the most inspiring thing.”