We’ve just entered Libra season with a Gaga moon rising! Our Lady has been rolling out a fairly low-key promo campaign (by Gaga standards) ahead of Joker: Folie à Deux, which comes out next week. Or so she had us fooled! Because it turns out she’s been lining up all sorts of releases that are about to drop in connection with the film. Shortly after Joker premiered in Venice last month, Gaga was seen filming at the Louvre in Paris, sporting a “Punk Raggedy Ann Doll” look. Rumors swirled that it was a music video for LG7, which she revealed is finally coming in February. But no! This shoot was for a teaser to promote another surprise: Gaga made what she calls a Joker “companion album” called Harlequin, and it’s coming out on Friday! The album includes 13 tracks from Broadway and the Great American Songbook (GAS!) that are featured in the film, but these are not the recordings from the film (more on that later). And if you stopped processing details after “Gaga – New Album – Friday,” it’s ok, I’m right there with you. Here’s what we know:
Harlequin could well be a stop-gap release between Chromatica and Lady Gaga’s long-teased seventh studio album. Its announcement arrives at the same time as billboards for “LG6.5,” and the singer has taken to calling her next album, apparently due in February, “LG7.” In addition, some of the Harlequin song titles — such as “Oh, When the Saints,” “World on a String,” “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” and “That’s Life” — indicate that it could be a sort of covers album.
Harlequin is one of two Joker-adjacent albums that comes out on Friday. The other is Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Joker: Folie à Deux (Score From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack).
Joker: Folie à Deux, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, hits theaters on October 4. Lady Gaga will release another album that day, too: Joker: Folie à Deux (Music From the Motion Picture).
Harlequin:
01 Good Morning
02 Get Happy (2024)
03 Oh, When the Saints
04 World on a String
05 If My Friends Could See Me Now
06 That’s Entertainment
07 Smile
08 The Joker
09 Folie à Deux
10 Gonna Build a Mountain
11 Close to You
12 Happy Mistake
13 That’s Life
Yes, that reporting is right, there are indeed three different Joker 2 albums coming our way. This Friday, September 27, we’re getting Harlequin, which is Gaga singing her own renditions of songs that are in the movie. Also this Friday, the official film score soundtrack comes out. Hildur Guðnadóttir returns as composer — she made history in 2020 with her Oscar win for Joker, becoming the first woman to win since the category combined comedy and drama film scores together. Hildur’s music is eerie and edgy and really thrives in bleak, sinister worlds (Prisoners, Chernobyl, Women Talking, Tár) and I only wish we had an original song collab between her and Gaga! So that’s two albums; we get the third next Friday October 4, the same day the movie comes out. That album is all the songs Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix sing in the film in character.
Why are they separating the score and songs from the same film soundtrack? To make more money! I can’t say for certain. But I can understand Gaga wanting to make Harlequin so she can really belt out those numbers. She’s spoken frequently during her press about how she had to unlearn her training to sing as Lee. So going back to the teaser she just dropped, it’s about a minute of her singing “The Joker,” from everyone’s favorite 1960s musical The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd. (And if you know that show, I love you.) I first heard “The Joker” as an impressionable college freshman when a family friend changed the trajectory of my life by introducing me to the daffy Australian comedy Kath & Kim, where “The Joker” was played over the opening credits. Since then I have been amassing a playlist of pretty much every version of the song I can track down (and that involves sifting through a lot of Steve Miller Band on iTunes, let me tell you). I’ve got Sammy Davis, Jr., Herbie Mann, Sergio Mendes, Wes Montgomery, obviously Anthony Newley from the original musical (he also wrote the song!), and of course, the incomparable Dame Shirley Bassey. I have been bouncing off the walls (in my own sedentary fashion) that in a mere 24 hours I will be able to add Lady Gaga to that list.
Photos credit: DT/Click News and Media/Backgrid and via Instagram
No
I am SO over Joker and the years of media glorification of deranged violent assholes. The world does not need more of that energy.
So any artist, project that’s playing into that, glorifying that is an auto-No for me,
Thank you @North of Boston. I’ve been targeted by someone who I think took direct inspiration from the first film. It makes me ill to think of what this sequel might bring.
I never even watched the first one. It seemed like a domestic violence provocateur made sexy and I’m like, do I need to see that. No I do not. And now set to music? Nah, I’ll just watch Les Mis again.
+1 to Joker exhaustion. Also, Gaga seems so thirsty in the acting world. Doesn’t have that same desperate vibe with music. Makes me sad for her.