Exclusive: Lady Gaga Says ‘Amy Winehouse Deserved Better’
Lady Gaga was “really devastated” to learn of Amy Winehouse’s death on July 23rd, she told Rolling Stone on Sunday while taking a break from recording a jazz duet of “The Lady is a Tramp” with Tony Bennett at a New York studio.
“It really affected me quite deeply,” she said. “Isn’t it strange to say ‘She is,’ and now I have to say ‘She was?’ I’m just really glad that we got to admire her and tell her how much we loved her when she was alive. I hope she knows now in Heaven, where she is, how much we all loved her.”
Bennett was the last to record with Winehouse, a duet of the 1930 classic “Body and Soul” in March at Abbey Road Studios in London. It will appear on his upcoming Duets II LP, out September 20th. “Everybody was apprehensive as to how it was going to go,” he said. “But she was really the best of all the young artists that I met in the current scene in the last 10 or 15 years. She was really singing true jazz. It’s just too tragic. I wanted to talk to her and tell her that if she doesn’t stop she’s going to die. I wanted to talk her out of the drugs, but unfortunately I never had a chance to talk to her.”
As she continued talking, Gaga’s eyes welled up. “I’m a huge fan,” she said. “She was my only hope when I was up and coming. Nobody knew who I was and I had no fans, no record label and everybody, when they met me, said I wasn’t pretty enough or that my voice was too low or strange. They had nowhere to put me. And then I saw her in Rolling Stone and I saw her live. I just remember thinking ‘Well, they found somewhere to put Amy…’”
Gaga added: “She’s really special. She just gave me a lot of hope and she deserved a lot better than what people gave her. And I hope that the world learns a lesson from this. I really hope they do. Because it’s not her lesson to learn – it’s the world’s.”
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