Lady Gaga took one of the most romantic moments of her life, Michael Polansky’s proposal, and turned it into a song. The singer spoke to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 about the backstory of her track “Blade of Grass,” which appears on her new album, Mayhem.
She needed to take some time away from the spotlight to be inspired as a songwriter: “If everything is promotion, then I’ll write about promotion, and I won’t write about that special moment I shared with you where Michael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day.
“We were in our backyard, and I said, ‘Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger,’ and then I wrote ‘Blade of Grass’ because I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard, and I remember thinking he should use that really long grass that’s in the center of the backyard.”
She said previously, she was more focused on fame and “had to fight a lot harder to make music” because her own life wasn’t inspiring her.
When she stepped away from the limelight, “my fans were like, ‘Why isn’t she promoting things?’ and ‘Where is she?’ But I needed to go live life to have a full life and also to give back to my true gift.”
Polansky brought her back to music, Gaga said. One of the “sweetest” things he told her was that at her core, “‘you’re an artist. That’s the thing that makes you the most happy, so we need to nurture that part of you,’” Gaga recalled.
Polansky was enormously supportive of Gaga making Mayhem. He spoke to ELLE in our February cover story about going to the studio with his partner.
“It’s been one of the most incredible parts of this chapter of my life, to live with and coexist alongside someone making art and being creative in ways that very few people get to experience,” he said. “I think of myself as really lucky to have been there for it.”
He added, “This album was so much fun to watch her make. She recorded it right down the street from our house, so we could easily walk back and forth from the studio. I spent a lot of time with her, bringing my laptop to work while she was there. What surprised me most was how fast she is. I couldn’t believe how quickly a song would take shape. Within five minutes, 80 percent of the song would have come from nothing.”
