Lady Gaga nearly left a fan-favorite track off Mayhem—until her fiancé, Michael Polansky, convinced her otherwise.
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During her appearance on Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang on March 12, the 14-time Grammy winner, 38, revealed that she almost cut How Bad Do U Want Me from the album.
“Oh my God, I almost didn’t put that on the album,” Gaga admitted. The synth-heavy, hyper-pop track started as a song she was working on at home when Polansky overheard it.
“He walks in the kitchen and goes, ‘Is that about me?’ and I was like, ‘No?’” she recalled, laughing.
As they continued working on the song together, Gaga realized it encapsulated a lifelong feeling—being seen as the “bad girl.”
“I’ve always felt archetyped as the ‘bad girl.’ That’s why the lyric is kind of funny,” she explained. She pointed out how lines about ripped-up jeans reflect the stereotype, saying, “I’ve always been at war with this feeling that, if I am interested in someone, they’re actually longing for a ‘good girl’ but they’re stuck with me.”
The chorus captures this theme:
“‘Cause you like my hair, my ripped-up jeans / You like the bad girl I got in me / She’s on your mind, like, all the time / But I got a tattoo for us last week / Even good boys bleed / How bad, bad do you want me?”
Despite her doubts about including the song on Mayhem, Polansky insisted she keep it.
“I was not sure that I should put that on the record, and Michael was like, ‘You have to—your fans are going to love that song.’”
Gaga admitted she sometimes hesitates when a song is “really super pop,” recalling similar feelings about her 2008 hit Just Dance.
“Thank God I didn’t listen to myself then,” she said.