Lady Gaga Hates Her Song ‘Telephone’ Due to Its ‘Stressful’ Production
Few artists have as many instantly recognizable major hit songs as Lady Gaga does. She has so many massive, iconic tracks that she is able to pick and choose favorites to perform and others to leave behind. At this point, she can afford to leave a few crowd pleasers out of her sets — including one of her most massive hits.
‘Telephone’ started life as a Britney Spears song
The pop stars that came up in the 2000s were often professional songwriters themselves. Gaga helped define that path to stardom, with credits under her real name Stefani Germanotta. With that in mind, it’s perhaps less surprising that one of her biggest hits, “Telephone,” was originally written for Britney Spears.
The song’s lyrics mix metaphors, using the titular “Telephone” to address Gaga’s fear of suffocation as well as her workaholic tendencies. According to Story of Song, the version that made it on The Fame Monster was reworked heavily. Beyoncé Knowles got on board and received songwriting credit for her tweaks to the final product.
The single became an enormous hit, peaking at third in the US. The accompanying video was a 10-minute epic packed with ideas and wild imagery. It landed at a time when both Gaga and Knowles were peaking in their pop culture dominance. The single was certified triple platinum by the RIAA and has nearly half a billion views on YouTube.
How does Lady Gaga feel about ‘Telephone’ today?
Gaga went from the massive, straightforward pop hit “Paparazzi” straight into the unwieldy, longer “Telephone.” The collaboration with Knowles made it a go-to for television performances. She performed various arrangements of the song throughout 2010, at various awards shows, and for the Super Bowl LI halftime show.
Despite the song, in many ways being one of the biggest hits of the entire year, Gaga came to resent both the video and the song itself. She found the video to be overstuffed with ideas, tediously long, and too sloppy for the amount of money involved. But her feelings on the song itself are a bit more complex, as she elaborated on in an interview with Pop Justice.
“[…]ultimately the mix and the process of getting the production finished was very stressful for me,” the “Bad Romance” singer said. “So when I say it’s my worst song, it has nothing to do with the song, just my emotional connection to it.”
Does Lady Gaga have issues with any of her other hit songs?
Gaga doesn’t have anything directly negative to say about the rest of her work. Obviously, she felt the need to add a whopping eight tracks to her debut release, The Fame, to justify its re-release as The Fame Monster. Several new singles from that crop of songs handily overshadowed the original LP.
Her fans would be right to assume that The Fame might contain Gaga’s least favorite tracks in her catalog. However, according to BuzzFeed, only a lone track is deemed “skippable” by the “Bad Romance” singer.
“I would skip over ‘Money Honey,'” Gaga said. She goes on to say that absolutely nothing from The Fame Monster is skippable. It does make sense, even for her fans, who have long described the track as a lesser version of the hit single, “Just Dance.”
