Lady Gaga - ARTPOP: Act II (2014)

'ARTPOP: Act II' was the planned sequel to Lady Gaga's fourth studio album from 2013 'ARTPOP', but instead she released the collaborative album with Tony Bennett, 'Cheek To Cheek' in 2014, and her fifth studio album emerged two years later with 'Joanne', so 'ARTPOP: Act II' has become the stuff of legend. In October 2012 Gaga announced that she considered 'ARTPOP' as "a bit more modern" and mentioned the possibility of splitting the project into a two-volume record; the first would contain the commercial songs, while the second would feature the experimental material. By October 2013 she'd confirmed that she had a number of songs for Act 2, and the following month she commented that it might be released before her tour, as it would be nice to play both acts live, dismissing her previous idea of splitting 'ARTPOP' into two halves. By April 2014 there appeared to be a strong possibility that she would release another volume of 'ARTPOP', but by September that plan was on the back-burner as the Bennett collaboration took precedence. Producer DJ White Shadow has been posting tweets about the album for some time, and following one where on April Fools Day 2021 he suggested releasing the track 'Tea' as an NFT, fans started a petition to get Lady Gaga and Interscope Records to release the album, and by later that month it had reached 40,000 signatures, which was acknowledged by Gaga herself on Twitter. While nothing concrete has come off the back of the petition, she did reveal during an interview on The Howard Stern Show in November 2013 that she'd written over 90 songs during the recording sessions for 'ARTPOP', fuelling speculation that a second volume was a possibility.  Late in the recording process, 'Temple' and 'Nothing On (But the Radio)' were cut from the album, while 'Brooklyn Nights' was removed at the last minute. At some point during the creation of the artRAVE: the ARTPOP ball, a backdrop and LED lights projection video for the stage were created for 'Brooklyn Nights', and the ball did include a few unreleased songs, such as  'Cake Like Lady Gaga', 'PARTYNAUSEOUS', and a part of the instrumental from 'Ratchet', and so with those tracks as a starting point, fans have been putting together their own versions of the finished album for some years now. Having checked out a few of their track listings I've taken what I think are the best recordings to make this version of 'ARTPOP: Act II', which includes all the tracks mentioned as being recorded for 'ARTPOP' and then cut, plus others that have leaked over the years from the original sessions. 

Track listing

01 PARTYNAUSEOUS (feat. Kendrick Lamar)
02 Tea
03 Red Flame (feat. Azealia Banks)
04 Tinnitus
05 Stache
06 Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe
07 Nothing On (But The Radio) 
08 Ratchet
09 Brooklyn Nights
10 I Wanna Be With You
11 Cake Like Lady Gaga (feat. DJ White Shadow)
12 I Want Your Love
13 Temple (feat. Matthew Koma)
14 ARTPOP 2.0

Lady Gaga - Team Love Child (2007)

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born on 28 March 1986 in Manhattan, New York City, to an upper middle class Catholic family of Italian ancestry. From the age of eleven she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Roman Catholic school, where she considered herself a misfit, and was mocked for "being either too provocative or too eccentric". She began playing the piano at age four, taking piano lessons and practicing through her childhood, and the lessons taught her to create music by ear, which she preferred over reading sheet music. As a teenager she played at open mic nights, and also enjoyed acting, playing the lead roles of Adelaide in the play Guys and Dolls, and Philia in the play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Regis High School, and this led to her studying method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute for ten years. In 2003, at age 17, she gained early admission to Collaborative Arts Project 21, a music school at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied music, and improved her songwriting skills by writing essays on art, religion, social issues and politics, including a thesis on pop artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst. In 2005 she withdrew from school during the second semester of her second year to focus on her music career, and recorded two songs with hip-hop artist Melle Mel for an audio book accompanying Cricket Casey's children's novel 'The Portal In The Park', and she also formed a band called the SGBand with some friends from NYU, playing  gigs around New York and becoming a fixture of the downtown Lower East Side club scene. After the 2006 Songwriters Hall of Fame New Songwriters Showcase at The Cutting Room in June, talent scout Wendy Starland recommended her to music producer Rob Fusari, who collaborated with her and helped her to develop her songs and compose new material. Fusari and Gaga established a company called Team Love Child LLC to promote her career, with the name coming from Gaga's description of herself as being the hypothetical lovechild of David Bowie and Jerry Lee Lewis. The duo recorded and produced electropop tracks, and posted many of them to her MySpace or PureVolume pages for a couple of months at a time, as well as sending them to music industry executives. Joshua Sarubin, the head of A&R at Def Jam Recordings, responded positively, and after approval from his boss, Gaga was signed to Def Jam in September 2006, although she was dropped from the label three months later. Having initially focused on avant-garde electronic dance music, Gaga began to incorporate pop melodies and the glam rock style of David Bowie and Queen into her songs, and despite splitting up, Fusari continued to develop the songs he had created with her, sending them to the producer and record executive Vincent Herbert, and in November 2007 Herbert signed her to his Streamline Records label, which was an imprint of the newly established Interscope Records. Gaga later credited Herbert as the man who discovered her, but that was certainly helped in no small part by Fusari's efforts on her behalf, and so this album celebrates their collaboration as Team Love Child, with seventeen of the songs that they wrote and recorded together in 2006 and 2007. 

Track listing

01 Dirty Ice Cream 
02 Oh Well
03 Glitter And Grease
04 Fancy Pants
05 Reel Cool
06 Shake Ur Kitty
07 Musicland (interlude)
08 Sexy Ugly
09 Blueberry Kisses
10 RetroPhysical
11 Fooled Me Again
12 Kandy Life
13 Love Sick Girl
14 We Are Plastic
15 Let Love Down
16 Filthy Pop
17 Rockshow