Lady Gaga - Abracadabra

Lady Gaga is a singer, songwriter, producer, and actress from New York. She’s one of the biggest artists in the world. She’s also won 14 Grammys, 2 Golden Globes, and an Oscar. And in March 2025, she released her sixth album, Mayhem. For this episode, I talked to her about a song from that album called “Abracadabra.” She co-wrote it and co-produced it with Andrew Watt and Cirkut, and they recorded it in Rick Rubin’s studio, Shangri-La. That’s also where we recorded the interview for this episode. For more info, visit songexploder.net/lady-gaga. https://songexploder.net/lady-gaga

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 2:37Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 2:58Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Lady Gaga is a singer, songwriter, producer, and actress from New York. She's one of the biggest artists in the world. She's also won 14 Grammys, two Golden Globes, and an Oscar. And in March 2025, she released her sixth album, Mayhem. For this episode, I talked to her about a song from that album called Abracadabra. She co-wrote it and co-produced it with Andrew Watt and Circuit, and they recorded it in Rick Rubin's studio, Shangri-La. That's also where we recorded the interview for this episode, which happens to be the 300th episode of the podcast. Here it is.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  My name is Lady Gaga.

• 3:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Before we get into the specifics of the song itself, I was wondering if, as you were going into making this album, if there were any big picture ideas that you were thinking about or aiming for?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Well, I will say that returning to my earlier sound, what I discovered kind of on the Lower East Side when I was first making music, that was something that I was excited about.

• 4:24Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What was behind that? What made you want to go back to your earlier days?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  You know, I expressed the darkness I felt as a young person through music, like my whole life, and it was scary. And I felt that around me for a really long time. So my earliest records were kind of dark, and they embodied live instrumentation with electronic music. But over time, I just artistically was going in lots of new musical directions, exploring myself. And then music became a business, which was not why I did this. So when I decided to make this album,

• 5:10Speaker 01

  I think I was just wanting to reclaim something that made me me. And my partner, Michael, was like, you know, you don't have to be afraid of your darkness anymore because you've really gotten a handle on it. Like, it's okay to go back there. So it was important to me, how do I get myself back? How can I make all of these dreams, these like Gothic fantasies that I have in music? How can I make them real? But that I don't have to wreck myself.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  I think trusting myself that I could make a dark album and that I would be okay was a big piece of it.

• 5:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Let's go to the day that the song started. Do you remember how that day began?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Me and Andrew Watt and Circuit, we were actually working on another song that didn't end up on the album. It was like a mid-tempo thing. But then Circuit was like, I've got something I've been working on. I wanted to play it for you.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  And I went up right away. I was like, what is that? That is crazy. And we just stopped everything that we were doing. Andrew was like, that could be a hard beat to write over because it's so busy.

• 6:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  And I was like, watch me. Because that kind of electronic chaos, that kind of like razor sharp thing just speaks to my soul so deeply.

• 7:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

  How would you articulate the feeling that you had when you first heard this beat?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  It's a feeling of your heart racing as fast as possible, some adrenaline, excitement, deep thrill and freedom.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  It almost reminded me of how I used to feel when I went out at night alone in my early twenties. I would just like have nothing to do but discover the night. Like what music was I going to hear? What DJs were going to be playing? Like what cool artist was I going to run into? It was really nostalgic.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  But it was still really modern. And I was also excited for the challenge because I could hear there was something special in what he had created. But that it also needed to become a fully formed song. So I just started writing. We turned it on and I just got on the mic.

• 8:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Like freestyling?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. A lot of my music, especially when we worked to track, is freestyled. And it happens pretty quickly. But it didn't have words yet. It was just kind of made up words.

• 8:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  And then me and Andrew went into this room here. And we started to work on a pre-chorus. And, you know, we had to build the chord structure to come out of that beat. Because it's got to like match circuits, atonal basslines. It has to grow out of that dissonance and that tension. Like, what is going to make it open? Because that beat, in a way, is kind of closed.

• 8:58Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  So what was going to happen to open up the song? But we did it at the piano and with the guitar.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  It had this kind of Gothic quality to it.

• 9:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What were the first words that you wrote?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  It was like a poem said by a lady in red. You hear the last few words of your life.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  I remember thinking of like being at a party and somebody kind of lording over the party, saying like, I'm going to decide how your evening goes. I'm going to control the whole thing. I will be in charge of whether or not you fall in love or you get too messed up to even make it home.

• 9:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  When you were thinking of that image, which side of that did you relate to more? Like, was that person who's kind of lording over the party, is that a figure that you usually are at a party? Or are you usually the person on the other side being like, okay, what's gonna happen?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  When we were writing it, I was imagining I was at the party and I was being kind of beset upon by this figure that was inclined to torture me into having the night of my life.

• 10:28Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Is that an experience that you feel like you've had, where you've been subject to someone else's setup?

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yes, Lady Gaga setup. You know, for a long time, keeping up with that side of myself. You know, like, if you're never dropping your stage persona.

• 10:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  And we all have like a public facing persona and if you just never drop it and if it has an edge to it, you know, too much of anything is bad. But then sometimes our dark side,

• 11:06Speaker 01

  it like really challenges us and makes us great because we learn a lot. I actually think part of what mayhem is about is the duality of me being both of these people.

• 11:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It's interesting because you both referred to it as torture, but also the night of your life.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, those are some of my issues, for sure.

• 11:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

  But I think in the context of the world that you'd constructed for yourself, the rigor that you'd made for yourself by inventing Lady Gaga and then having to live up to that, I could see how both of those things would apply.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Well, you know, as someone that played classical piano since I was really little and I had a lot of really strict teachers and went to ballet and, you know, all my disciplines, I will say that like there is a kind of suffering in discipline when you're working really hard. And I think I just took that to a really far degree in my work my whole life. And I became kind of someone that thrived on intensity. I think that this song is definitely grappling with intensity. It's a test, but it's also kind of not up to you. I think that's a lot how I feel about being an artist.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  I don't really feel like I fully chose this. If I was a tree, it would be like someone just grabbed the trunk and just said, this is where you're gonna grow.

• 12:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  So the abracadabra piece, it's a spell that this lady in red is casting on the listener, on the nightclub. And that pre-chorus, it's a ritual. It's like, I'm gonna read you this poem and we're going to have a ceremony and we're gonna see how tough you are.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  So we had written a chord progression that we then gave to Circuit to put into the track to open up into a chorus.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  And I started just going, abracadabra, and I was saying abracadabra over and over again at first. But I was so excited about making up my own words, that it could be anything, because it was this spell. Like, what would this spell even be? But I knew that death and love was something that I wanted to be, like, at the helm of what this lady in red was saying to the room. And so I started thinking about Latin and Italian and what would be like the Gothic Romance words. Like mort in French is death. So then I was asking Paul, our engineer, to look up different words.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And then he was like, morta is the god of death. We spent a couple of days carving out every single word.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Abracadabra, amor unalna. Abracadabra, morta ugaga.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  But in order for me to really know that it was lyrically right, I wanted to hear it with all the harmonies.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Abracadabra, amor unalna. Abracadabra, morta ugaga. Abracadabra, abra unalna. In her tongue she said, "Death or love tonight."

• 14:59Speaker 01

  I couldn't hear it without it.

• 15:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Because the magic and the glamour of the song is in how gaudy it is in the chorus. And I couldn't hear if it was the right words until it was fully opulent.

• 15:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  My conversation with Lady Gaga continues after this. Song Exploder is sponsored by DistroKid. If you're an independent artist, DistroKid is now offering a new way to start selling merch without dealing with inventory or running an online store. DistroKid Direct automatically turns your existing album artwork into merch products like shirts and hoodies, posters, totes, all kinds of things. And you choose what to sell, you set your prices, you connect PayPal, and DistroKid handles the printing, the shipping, and the customer support. They don't take a commission, so you keep 100% of your merch sales. It's a simple way to add another revenue stream to your music career without adding more work to your plate.

• 16:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 16:45Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 17:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 17:50Speaker 01

  What was so deeply like inside of me when I was writing is some of New York. In New York, the spirit of ballroom culture is something that I have always admired and has been deeply meaningful to me my whole life as an artist and the LGBTQ plus community and the way that I've been embraced as a human being and been accepted as a young person. I've like found my people. And I think there is something about this spell that's also speaking to being a resilient

• 18:28Speaker 01

  person and being inspired by resilient people and what it means to be tested constantly in your life and to say, I'm up for the challenge. I'm going to do this. So when we eventually got to the verses.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  It actually became very spiritual and it became about resilience.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Pay the toll to the angels drawing circles in the clouds.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And then it was less about this being like completely grim, this story, and more of a dance club anthem.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Keep your mind on the distance when the devil turns around.

• 19:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What were you imagining with those lyrics?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  It's what do you have to do to keep going, to get to the next phase? As you're headed toward all the good in your life and the devil's on your back, like, don't turn around.

• 19:31Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And what about the way you delivered those lines? What were you thinking about for that?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Vocally, this song was, it's an interesting performance. I actually think that the thing that I was channeling the most was a kind of metal gravitas, but in a pop way. So I was sort of trying to marry what I would imagine it would have sounded like if, you know, Iron Maiden was doing this song.

• 20:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, I can see that. They had like a sense of authority.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Right. Authority is the right word.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Keep your mind on the distance when the devil turns around.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  And then we put that in to Circle's track and then he was building it even more. We actually went through like three different versions of production and we ultimately ended in like a house style.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  I remember being like emotional when we decided to do that because I was like, this is right because everything for me always went back to the dance floor. So it was completely full circle. And that lyric right after, "Hold me in your heart tonight in the magic of the dark moonlight", like, that's sort of like acknowledging that sometimes our demons can be our friends because we know them so well. Like, I'm gonna be there for you when you go through this.

• 21:22Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I also wanted to ask you about this sound. It sort of twists and morphs and in some ways it's almost more like sound design.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Circuit made that.

• 21:31Hrishikesh Hirway?

  There's like an element that's descending and ascending at the same time.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds like the club's gonna explode. We just were really open to trying different ways to making it feel chaotic. That played a huge role in everything that we did. There was always something distorting in some way or bending, building the tension that would release.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  It just started to get crazier and crazier. And by the bridge, when we got to the bridge, I became a completely different person.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  It wasn't like I was like, oh, I think we should do opera here. Like, I just started singing that way. This ending is this huge crescendo.

• 23:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  For all the stuff that was happening fast and intuitively, were there any parts of the song that felt like you really had to labor over it to get right?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  I would say the second verse, the lyric "No Return." Don't waste time on a feeling, use your passion, no return. I changed that lyric after the song was mixed because it was, "Don't waste time on a feeling, use your passion, it's your turn." And I like called everybody into the studio and I was like, "We have to change this. This is wrong."

• 23:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Why was it wrong?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Because "it's your turn," I felt was signaling something that the song was kind of already saying. We knew we were up for the test and you don't want a second verse that's like sort of revisiting the first verse and not going anywhere new. But "no return," it was raising the stakes, like you can't give up. And the song didn't have that in it yet. And what was also bugging me for a while was, "Choose the road on the west side as the dust flies, watch it burn." Choose the road on the west side as the dust flies, watch it burn.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Because it was such a metal lyric. And I'm like, is this just wrong for what this song could be? Because there's so much about Abracadabra that is just not what anyone would think of as what would be on the radio or streaming. I mean, it's like not easy listening. It's got all these niche references and it's so maximalist.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  And loud.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  And so during the songwriting process, I'm battling a lot of judgment, inner judgment. I'm judging myself for what I've created. But that was what it was supposed to be. It has all of the pieces of something that is quintessentially me. The intervals of the melody, the made up words, the fantastic idea mixed with these heavy dance beats, with rock instrumentation. Like, this blend of things is what Lady Gaga is to me.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  It's almost like if you had one chance to architect a building to show who you are, but you were desperate for people to know.

• 26:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  So you just like put gargoyles and columns and marble and grass. And there's a lake. And it's just because you're just trying to say, I'm everything. I'm all these things. Yeah, so I was judging myself. And then I sort of accepted who I am through the process and became OK with it.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  What I found that day was an understanding of a challenge that I had been a part of for so long that I had been so afraid of acknowledging and knowing. And I finally like put a name to it all. It has helped me to take ownership over something that used to run my life in a negative way. You know, it's like you create yourself. I made Lady Gaga, but then like people reflect back to you what they think. They have maybe a fantasy of you or dreams for you that are not yours. But I took back the dreams that were mine.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  And what I realized is that the biggest dream that I had was being myself as an artist.

• 27:28Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And now here's "Abracadabra" by Lady Gaga in its entirety.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Pay the toll to the angels Draw in circles in the clouds Keep your mind on the distance When the devil comes around Hold me in your heart tonight In the magic of the dark moonlight Save me from this empty fight In the game of life Like a poem said by a lady in red You hear the last few words of your life With a haunting dance Now you're both in a trance It's time to cast your spell on the night

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Abracadabra, amor unanah Abracadabra, moraugaga Abracadabra, abra unanah In her tongue she said "Devil love the night" Abracadabra, Abracadabra Abracadabra, Abracadabra Feel the fire under your feet The fire's on fire Abracadabra, Abracadabra Choose the road on the west side As the dust flies, watch it burn Don't waste time on feeling

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Use your passion for the night Hold me in your heart tonight In the magic of the dark moonlight Save me from this empty fight In the game of life Like a poem said by a lady in red You hear the last few words of your life With a haunting dance Now you're both in a trance It's time to cast your spell on the night

• 31:14Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net to learn more, including some footnotes that go with this episode. You'll find links to buy or stream Abracadabra, and you can watch the music video. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Special thanks to Dylan Maron and all the folks at Shangri-La. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. And if you'd like to hear more from me about what I'm listening to and watching and thinking about, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which you can find on Substack or on the

• 31:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Radiotopia.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  From PRX.