Lady Gaga stays in character on Harlequin. It’s her companion to Joker: Folie a Deux, inspired by her role as Harley Quinn. But it’s a luxuriant album of jazzy swing, mostly standards, right in her sweet spot. Harlequin is in the swank mode of her Tony Bennett albums Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale, as well as her Jazz & Piano residency in Vegas. It’s the first time she’s recorded standards since her beloved Bennett passed away last year. As she told Rolling Stone’s Angie Martoccio, she wanted to “create a modern take on vintage pop.”
Gaga is calling this “LG 6.5,” as the world eagerly awaits the next full-on Gaga album, due to arrive in February — her first since 2020’s Chromatica. Harlequin is a tantalizing placeholder, but it’s all her, since Gaga’s passion for Old Hollywood glamour and grotesquerie has always been deep in her fame-monster soul. She brings loads of her own personality and presence to “The Joker” — the Anthony Newley/Lesley Bricusse show tune from The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd, made famous by Shirley Bassey. (Not the Steve Miller Band ode to midnight tokin’.) She echoes Judy Garland everywhere, from “Good Morning” to “Get Happy.”
She rocks out in “I’ve Got The World on a String,” the 1932 Harold Arlen/Ted Koehler standard, and scats up a storm in “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” from the 1966 Verdon/Fosse hit Sweet Charity. Other renditions are more straightforward (“Close to You”) or tied to the film in ways that don’t necessarily stand on their own, as in “Oh, When The Saints,” with a key change for nearly every verse. For the killer finale, she vamps through the Sixties Sinatra swagger of “That’s Life,” a perfect song for Gaga — her bravado recalls the David Lee Roth version. When she belts, “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a queen,” it’s a statement of fact.
But the highlight is her own “Happy Mistake,” one of the two originals amid the standards, along with the frothy waltz “Folie a Deux.” She taps into the connection between her alter ego Harley Quinn and herself, hiding her pain behind makeup and costumes so the show can go on, weeping the tears of a clown when there’s no one around. “My head is filled with broken mirrors,” Gaga laments, over the acoustic guitar. “If I could fix the broken pieces/Then I’d have a happy mistake.” It’s not the first time she’s asked how she got hooked on the constant attention and adoration of the world. On Harlequin, she uses all these artifacts of vintage pop to continue a story she’s been telling her entire career.
