Lady Gaga finally dropped her long-awaited album MAYHEM last week, and while it's full of songs Little Monsters are surely playing on repeat, there is one track on the record that nearly didn't make the cut.
During an appearance on the March 12 episode of the Las Culturistas podcast, Gaga told hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang that the song "How Bad Do U Want Me" was nearly axed from the 14-track album and how her fiancé Michael Polansky convinced her to keep it on the record.
"Oh my god, I almost didn't put that on the album," she said, adding, "I was not sure that I should put that on the record, and Michael was like, 'You have to — your fans are going to love that song."
The "Abracadabra" singer explained her hesitation of including the "total hyper-pop song" on the record, even comparing her initial reaction to the track to one of her most iconic songs, "Just Dance," from her 2008 debut album The Fame.
"Sometimes, when things are really super pop, I just get a weird reaction [to them]," she said. "I felt this way about 'Just Dance,' so thank God I didn't listen to myself then."
Gaga also shared that while the track is a "fun pop song," she actually cried while writing it because of its connection to how she has felt trapped in her description as a "bad girl" throughout her life.
"That song embodies a feeling that I've had probably my whole life, which is that I always felt archetyped as the 'bad girl,'" she said. "It's why the lyric is kind of funny – 'you like my hair, my ripped-up jeans.' That's like so stereotypical, like the girl with the ripped jeans is bad, right..."
She continued, "But I've always felt this kind of, like, shame that I've always been at war with this feeling that if I am, you know, interested in someone that they're actually longing for a 'good girl,' but they're stuck with me and I'm who they really want, but like we're in this three-way relationship. And there is no actual other good girl, but the good girl's in their head and they're kind of comparing me the whole time."
On Las Culturistas, the reigning winner of iHeartPodcast's Podcast of the Year, Rogers and Yang "get into the hottest pop-culture moments of the day" and even hang out with special guests like Ariana Grande, Tate McRae, Charli XCX and Cynthia Erivo, to name a few. Check out more episodes of the Las Culturistas podcast at iHeart.com.