Lady Gaga Explains the Connection Between Taylor Kinney and "Perfect Illusion"

"I love Taylor so much and he's my best friend," she told E! News.

By Samantha Schnurr Oct 03, 2016 1:00 PMTags

Was Lady Gaga's relationship with Taylor Kinneyperfect illusion? Not exactly. 

When the songstress' first single off her upcoming fifth album, Joanne, hit the airwaves, fans immediately began speculating that the song had been crafted as an ode to Gaga's paused engagement to the Chicago Fire star.

Two months after addressing their unexpected break on social media, Gaga released the track with a chorus that rang, "It wasn't love. It was a perfect illusion."

"I would just say that my music on my album as well as all my albums is inspired by my personal life and this one more than others," she explained to E! News when asked about the song's meaning. "I have said it before—I love Taylor so much and he's my best friend."

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Lady Gaga's One-of-a-Kind Street Style
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Gaga says the song is meant to reflect a common feeling in relationships driven by the digital age—one she has also felt. 

"This video is a performance of a song that I wrote of that moment about how I feel, but how I'm sure he's felt sometimes, how you have felt sometimes, how other people feel in relationships, how I see my friends struggle and become just full of rage and anger as they try to figure out how to date during a time when everybody's sort of creating these perfect illusions of themselves on the Internet and nobody really knows what's real and what isn't," she explained. "It's about all of that."

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Decoding the Lyrics of Lady Gaga's New Song "Perfect Illusion"—Is Taylor Kinney the Subject?

To combat all of those virtual boundaries, the songstress wanted the accompanying music video to be "really pure and really honest."

"Nothing was choreographed," she explained to E! News. "I didn't rehearse any of those things that you see in the video. Everything in that was just completely in the moment—pure, raw performance of how I feel."

"The intention was there to be no perfect illusions in the video about perfect illusions," she laughed. "It's so beautiful in that way. I love that opening shot in the video when it's just a silent light pouring through the hands of the fans as they're all dancing and nobody has a cell phone in their hands and everybody's got a little dirt on them and it's something that we don't do anymore."

With the help of Joanne, Gaga aims to inspire that cell phone-free human connection that often feels extinct nowadays. 

"It's not extinct because through me and through this album, I will make it un-extinct," Gaga promised. "That is my dream."

While we'll just have to wait and see if that dream comes to fruition, in the meantime, Gaga has her mind solely on the music. 

"I just want to do what I'm doing right in this moment. I want to sing and dance and be as close as I can to as many fans and people as possible and bring them together through music and through live performance. That's my calling and that's really what I'm most focused on," she explained. 

Lady Gaga will be able to do just that during intimate shows for her upcoming Dive Bar Tour in collaboration with Bud Light Music.To find out more details, fans can turn to Bud Light's Facebook page on October 5th at 10 p.m. EST.

"I don't really want anything other than to make people happy through music," she concluded. "I hope that I can bring these Joanne vibes to the world."