Last month, Lady Gaga released Disease – a track that harks back to her dark pop and synth-pop roots, reminiscent of early albums The Fame, Born This Way and Artpop. But in true Gaga fashion, she didn’t stop there; she has now unveiled a guitar-led version of the song.
“After I spent some time on the production for The Antidote Live – which was built around me at the piano – I started thinking about how I may go even deeper,” Gaga tells Vogue.
“Since the chorus of Disease was written at the piano, that version was in some parts really delicate and almost somber. So, something I always try to do when I’m singing a song again is to go deeper, and I wondered if we took some of the electric guitar energy that’s on the pop version and stripped it back – would I find another level to the song? And I did.”
The guitar version, dubbed The Poison Live, features her longtime guitarist Tim Stewart playing a Suhr Classic JM in an Olympic White finish.
“With the electric guitar, there’s a sense of fun that I found in the torture of the lyrics, and some of Tim’s choices with the chord inversions gave it a sense of ‘hurt,’ and I thought that was really interesting and something I hadn’t discovered before,” she continues.
Stewart has been a mainstay of Lady Gaga’s band and even played at her 2017 Super Bowl halftime show – an experience he described as one of the most memorable of his career.
“There’s no way I can fully describe the feeling you have on that stadium stage,” he said in a 2020 Guitar World interview.
“You’ve got everybody around you, and you’re being beamed out to a billion people around the world. It’s thrilling, humbling, scary, crazy - you’re like, ‘This can’t possibly be happening, right? This must be a dream.’”
Lady Gaga recently collaborated with Bruno Mars on the Andrew Watt-produced Die with a Smile, which has topped the Billboard Global 200 chart for eight weeks, making it the year’s longest-reigning song.
