Lady Gaga‘s Joker: Folie À Deux companion album, Harlequin, is out today, and many of the 13 jazzy tracks are taken right out of the Great American Songbook. There are two originals, however, and you might expect “The Joker” to be one of them. But nope, the song hails from the 1964 musical The Roar Of The Greasepaint – The Smell Of The Crowd and was later performed by Shirley Bassey. Gaga, who plays Harley “Lee” Quinn in the Joker sequel, called her cover the “most daring” song on the album.
“The most daring is on ‘The Joker.’ Michael [Polansky, Gaga’s fiancé] and I wanted to show the defiance of Lee proclaiming that she is the real criminal in all of this,” Gaga told Entertainment Weekly, “and that she has the ability to mastermind a kind of coup d’etat in their relationship, that she is the persona of Joker incarnate, in a woman.”
Speaking about the album as a whole, Gaga said, “I think they’re all risky. Some of these songs, like ‘Get Happy,’ are from the 1930s. We’re in 2024, the song is nearly 100 years old. We focused on deploying slapstick and lyrical changes in reference to Arthur [Fleck]. He made his way into the album as well. The lyric, ‘If a nice guy can lose, what’s it matter if you win?’ — that’s pretty daring, considering who Arthur is, what he’s done, and it’s something the film grapples with. We’re rooting for Arthur, and yet he killed five people.”
Harlequin is out now. Joker: Folie À Deux releases in theaters on October 4.