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
