After a week full of teases the wait is over: Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ duet, “Die With a Smile,” dropped on Thursday night and it’s as big a song as one would expect from this mega-tag-team.
While the look for the video is ‘70s country, the song itself is a soulful ballad in the mold of Mars’ Soul Sonic project of 2021 — soaring vocals, a big chorus, gently strummed guitars and a sky-scraping climax on the final chorus. He takes the first verse and Gaga the second, and from there the two play off of each others’ powerful vocals.
The video, however, is styled more like a ’70s Nashville television appearance, with all of the players in matching light blue suits with red shirts — Gaga’s hair is stacked into a Dolly Parton-style pile while Mars sports a white cowboy hat and strums a beautiful vintage hollow-body electric guitar. She delivers the last verse with a cigarette clenched in her teeth and the clips concludes with the pair inside an animated heart.
Indeed, according to the press release, the song started with Mars. Gaga said, “Bruno and I have a lot of mutual respect for each other and were talking about collaborating. I was finishing up my own album in Malibu and one night after a long day he asked me to come to his studio to hear something he was working on. It was around midnight when I got there and I was blown away when I heard what he had started making. We stayed up all night and finished writing and recording the song. Bruno’s talent is beyond explanation. His musicianship and vision is next level. There’s no one like him.”
Mars added, “Getting to work with Gaga has been an honor. She’s an icon and she makes this song magical. I’m so excited for everyone to hear it.”
The song was co-produced by the artists with 2021 Grammy-winning producer of the year Andrew Watt (Post Malone, Elton John, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, the latest Rolling Stones album) and D’Mile (who also co-produced and co-wrote most of the Silk Sonic album, as well as H.E.R.’s “I Can’t Breathe”); Watt also played lead guitar and D’Mile played bass and drums. Gaga, Mars, D’Mile and Watt wrote the song with James Fauntleroy (Mars, Rihanna, Frank Ocean, Beyonce, SZA, Kendrick Lamar and many others).
Gaga, of course, is starring in the upcoming comic book musical “Joker: Folie À Deux,” which features singing but is “unlike anything I’ve ever done before,” she said recently in an interview with Empire. The Grammy and Oscar winner stars opposite Joaquin Phoenix in the movie as Lee, a reimagining of Harley Quinn.
The new song with Mars seems to be completely unrelated to the film, although its title is certainly on-theme for the Joker.