It’s no secret that Lady Gaga has an amazing singing voice, but is she good at playing any instruments – including the piano?
Lady Gaga can play the piano, and she’s been doing it since age four. The Grammy-winning artist delivered many memorable performances on this instrument and her discography includes several piano-driven ballads.
Childhood Piano Lessons
Lady Gaga started playing the piano when she was four, but there are different accounts on how it happened. According to InStyle, her mother Cynthia Germanotta said that she “learned to play piano by ear at home when she was really young”, but there’s more to this story.
According to the singer’s biography written by Paula Johanson, she started taking piano lessons at age four because her mother wanted her to be “a cultured young woman”. She preferred playing music by ear over reading sheet music, and it’s possible that’s why the rumors about her being self-taught started circling around.
Her interest in music grew stronger as the years went by, and her dad promised to buy her a baby grand piano if she learned how to play Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”. She was up to the challenge, and he took out a loan to make good on his promise.
Some of her piano lessons were pretty intense, and she used to get really emotional while playing classical pieces. One teacher even made her play the piano with her wrists tied together because she was “very floppy” with her hands.
Lady Gaga’s very first piano went for an auction in 2016, and its pre-sale estimate price ranged between $100,000 and $200,000. It was reported that her paternal grandparents bought it in 1966 for $780 and later gave it to her family.
A portion of the proceeds was supposed to benefit the singer’s Born This Way Foundation, but it failed to find a buyer at the auction, and it’s unclear what happened to it afterward.
Lady Gaga’s Love for Piano
Playing the piano has always been an essential part of Lady Gaga’s creative process. She started her career by singing in dive bars, and dragged her keyboard from one gig to the next, pretending she’s her own manager.
Lady Gaga didn’t ditch her favorite instrument after finding global fame, and her songwriting process usually starts at the piano. She believes that “all good music can be played at a piano and still sound like a hit” and often tested this theory during her live performances.
Piano-Driven Performances
Most of Lady Gaga’s songs are so catchy and upbeat that it doesn’t seem like they would sound good with nothing but the piano in the background, yet she somehow makes it work.
She impressed fans with amazing stripped-down versions of her biggest hits, including “Bad Romance”, “Poker Face”, and “Paparazzi”. None of them would’ve worked if it wasn’t for her epic piano skills, and she put them to some good use in many more songs.
Lady Gaga isn’t best known for slow, piano-driven ballads, but she excels at making them. “Million Reasons”, “Speechless”, and “Joanne” fall under this category and put her vocal and instrumental abilities on full display.
The same can be said about her Oscar-nominated track “Til It Happens to You”, featured in the documentary The Hunting Ground. She delivered a chilling rendition of this song at the Academy Awards in 2016, seated behind a white piano, and dedicated it to assault survivors.
Lady Gaga once again proved that power ballads are her forte while working on the soundtrack for A Star is Born. This album gave us several pretty good slow jams, but “Shallow” went on to become the biggest hit.
Lady Gaga played this song on the piano at the Oscars in 2019, alongside her co-star Bradley Cooper. No one was surprised when she picked up the award for the best original song, and their moving performance was all people could talk about at the end of the night.