Lady Gaga’s ‘The Fame Monster’ Turns 5: Stan & Deliver

Name: Matt Russoniello | Location: NYC, USA | Twitter: @theboythoreau

4. Speechless

If there is one point Lady Gaga likes to hammer home more than the fact that she’s Italian and has been singing jazz since the age of 13, it is that she is, at heart, a classic-rock-lovin’ singer-songwriter stuck in the body of a pop star. “Speechless,” the literal and figurative centerpiece of The Fame Monster, is the best example from her discography to support her argument.

Written as a plea for her father to undergo heart surgery, “Speechless” actually speaks to universal themes of loss and love and fear and friendship and possibly Lüc Carl (remember him?) and definitely whiskey. Let us not forget the whiskey.

All of Gaga’s albums have featured at least one piano ballad, but “Speechless” remains her most beloved (and, objectively, her best). It’s a great song, yes, but it earned its status not just from being great from the many thrilling ways in which she brought it to life. She debuted the song at a bespoke pink piano, decorated with butterflies. She performed it atop a 10-foot-tall, Salvador Dalí-inspired piano for the Queen of England while wearing an Elizabethan gown made entirely of red PVC. At the 2010 Grammys, she emerged from a smoky furnace on a two-sided piano, seated across from that Other Queen of England, Elton John. She smashed a glass cube with her mic stand and belted it out from among the flames at the 2009 AMAs, and then she took that concept to its extreme on The Monster Ball Tour, performing it each night under a funnel cloud of fire. And all of this for a song that was never released as a single.

It was this song (and her many iconic performances of it) that made everyone, not just her rapidly-growing base of newly-minted Little Monsters, take notice and see that, behind the double entendre-laden dance jams and underneath the bizarre costumes, Gaga was an incredibly talented songwriter, operating on her own plane.

So let’s raise a glass — to mend all the broken hearts of all our wrecked up friends — and, of course, to “Speechless.”