If Gaga is enacting another stage of a gimlet-eyed scheme to broaden her appeal, she doesn’t sound like it. His family were unconvinced he would be able to record the album at all.īeyond sympathy and sentiment, Love for Sale disarms cynicism simply by being infectiously good fun. Bennett is 95 and has Alzheimer’s, diagnosed after plans for the album were laid: the two shows he and Gaga gave last month in New York were his final public performances, and Love for Sale will be the last new release of a recording career that began 72 years ago. But cynicism is quite a hard pose to maintain when confronted by the album itself, which arrives bearing an emotional charge that its predecessor did not. That cynical voice might say something similar about Love for Sale, a collection of Cole Porter songs that arrives a year after Gaga’s Chromatica: a well-reviewed return to electronic dance-pop that didn’t restore her once dominant position within the pop firmament. If the pop world was slipping out of her grasp, Cheek to Cheek smartly opened Lady Gaga up to a different market: not jazz fans per se, but the old-fashioned, easy-listening end of the BBC Radio 2 audience – a cohort, it’s worth adding, who still buy physical product.
You didn’t have to buy the rumour, vehemently denied by the singer, that it lost her label $25m and led to redundancies to figure out that shifting 2.5m copies was noticeably different to the 15m of her debut. Her third album, Artpop, met with mixed reviews and, by her previous standards, underwhelming sales. Before Cheek to Cheek, Gaga’s career had wobbled. If you wanted to be cynical, you might also have suggested it was a savvy move.