LADY GAGA TELLS ELVIS DURAN ABOUT MARIJUANA

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THE ELVIS DURAN INTERVIEW

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Lady Gaga On Elvis Duran

Lady Gaga sat down with Elvis Duran and The Z100 Morning Show to talk about the release of her new album ARTPOP(out today), being the first performer to sing in space, and her emotional struggles with drugs and depression in the past. Elvis was able to dig into "Gaga's basement," during his 45 minute exclusive with the POP SuperStar. Elvis, as usual, created a comfortable atmosphere in which Gaga felt safe enough to discuss these difficult topics.

ON BEING ADDICTED TO MARIJUANA

“I just want young kids to know that you actually can become addicted to it [marijuana]… I have been addicted to it and its ultimately related to anxiety coping and it’s a form of self medication and I was smoking up to 15-20 marijuana cigarettes a day with no tobacco. I was living on a totally other psychedelic plain, numbing myself completely and looking back I do see now that some of it had to do with my hip pain. I didn’t know where the pain was coming from so I was just in a lot of pain and really depressed all the time and not really sure why.”

“It’s a battle, every day. I don’t want to lie about it because there is no reason to lie. But, the truth is that it is very hard to be famous. It’s wonderful to be famous because I have amazing fans. But it is very, very hard to go out into the world when you are not feeling happy and act like you are because I am a human being too and I break and I think there is an assumption, not just by the corporate world, or by humanity that I cannot break because I am alien woman and I am unstoppable. The truth is that I can break, and I did. I was not very good at breaking. I lost everything that I love. I was in a wheelchair for six months. I did a lot of drugs and took a lot of pills. I let it all kind of go because I didn’t know if I was going to live for the next year or two. When your schedule gets that out of control and you’re not able to feel the ground anymore you lose a sense of your own soul.”

“I had to stop. I was addicted to it [marijuana]... I’ve been addicted to various things since I was young. Most heavily over the past seven years. A friend gave me this term I lily pad from substance to substance because I get to a point where I can’t go any further with one substance so I move to another.”

ON OVERCOMING HER ADDICTION AND HER MESSAGE TO HER FANS

“You can fight. I do put that pressure on myself; I have to be high to be creative. I need that, that’s an error in my life that happened for over 10 years. Can I be brilliant without it? I know that I can be and I have to be because I want to live, and I want my fans to want to live. I don’t want them to torture themselves in the way I have. I want to show people that I will last past 27 and I will last longer, and so will you. I want to change this code in the atmosphere that in order to be remembered I must die young. In order to be remembered as a legend I must be dead first. This is unhealthy. The way that we [celebrities] are treated by the media, this is unhealthy. Not just me, I am just one of many people that are treated poorly by the media.”

ON HER ACHILLES HEEL IN THE BUSINESS AND HOW SHE OVERCAME IT

“Look I think my Achilles heel in this business has always been from the beginning, like, oh is she a rich girl from New York? Did she go to a private school? But actually I did go to a privileged school, I did go to a private school, I did have a great education. My parents were not rich, they sent me to a great school with all the money that they had…I am smart. I will no longer allow this thing that was my Achilles heel to remain there.”

ON THE PRESSURES OF BEING A FEMALE ARTIST

“There’s this incredible pressure on female artists that we have to reinvent ourselves between each record. Michael Jackson didn’t reinvent himself with each album, or Elton John or Whitney Houston. These are some of my favorite artists in history. What I was thinking about was I don’t want to throw my wigs away, I don’t want to throw my outfits away, I want to celebrate them because these are the inventions that got me to where I am. I want my fans to know that you really just need one good idea. I feel like this pressure that the public puts on you to have several good ideas over and over again until you die; this is actually not reality.”

ON GETTING OUT OF THE CORPORATE MOLD

“ARTPOP is definitely a time that we are really excited to be putting art into the front and that corporations will no longer drive me or my work and that the House of Gaga- this is our foray into the art and technology world. The artRave was the beginning of that.”

ON THE CHANGES SHE MADE FOR ARTPOP AND WHY SHE IS DIFFERENT

“I’m usually already on to the next album when the album comes out. I’m really very fascinated with this transformation inside of me that I am feeling very happy and confident in the work that I have created. I really love this album. I mostly love this album because it helped me lose 30 pounds in the gym!”

ON WHAT ARTPOP IS ALL ABOUT

"This album is about joy, coming into my own, and also really deciding for myself as an artist that I don’t need to change my image with every single album. This was something I was really fascinated with iconography and how we see the artist.”

“This is why ARTPOP is so important to me. I want the world to know that the real intelligence is in the heart and the mind of the artist and not the corporation.”

ON NOT BEING A FORMULA AND BUILDING THE HOUSE OF GAGA USING HER GREATEST TALENT

“When you have road bumps in your career everybody starts to shake and everybody starts to get nervous… The reality is that there was never any formula and I am not a marketing plan and I never have been. ARTPOP has no marketing plan… This was something that was generated by this young collective group called the House of Gaga, which has been our debut on Sunday at the artRave… What I’m trying to say I guess is that I may be talented at music, but my greatest talent is seeing potential in others.”

ON DIGGING DEEPER AND ABOUT WHO LADY GAGA IS AS AN ARTIST

“I think the truth is that since the beginning of my career, although I am a pop star now, I was not generated by a factory, I was not generated by a corporation, and there was no team other than the team that I put together that helped me make my artistic dreams come true.”

ON THE MIND OF AN ARTIST AND WHAT ARTPOP SHOULD MEAN TO HER FANS

“If our minds go, there is nothing else. Somebody gives me a canvas at the beginning of every album cycle and its blank. I am left with a paintbrush and I sit by myself. That is the thing I want people to know and recognize not just about me, but about themselves… There is a canvas, a paintbrush, and an artist and then the ideas start to come. That is what ARTPOP is. What I want my fans to know is that you will not be defined by the people that hire you. You will not be defined by the corporate world around you. You will be defined the ideas that are in your own heart and in your own mind. It is just you, and that brush, and that canvas. You will work hard enough that one day you will sign only your name at the bottom of that blank page.

ON HER SPACE PERFORMANCE IN 2015

“It’s going to happen in 2015… This event where I didn’t have to pay for my seat, and it was offered to me by Zero G Colony and Virgin Galactic to be the first to technically to sing from space. Who knows if someone will build a rocket before then, I don’t know! It was more important to me that I am the first to sing from a Virgin Galactic space craft.”

ON WHAT IT TAKES TO PERFORM IN SPACE

“I’ll explain this to you - it’s not so easy to sing from space. Even if you are flying to space on one of these commercial flights this is not congruent with the actual event and what will be done. This is an entire event and festival that’s being created to take music to the beyond and have me, the artist, singing from this space craft and that will be live streamed back to earth while there is a concert going on Ground Zero.”