A collaboration between Bruno Mars and Woman Gaga was all the time going to have lofty expectations, however when the 2 wrote and recorded “Die With a Smile” on the latter’s Los Angeles studio earlier this 12 months, there was no discuss of topping the charts. They solely wished to observe the place the track was naturally taking them, remembers hit-making songwriter-producer Andrew Watt, who beforehand labored with Gaga on The Rolling Stones’ 2023 Hackey Diamonds observe “Candy Sounds of Heaven.”
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“This was a pure, natural factor that each these artists who respect one another a lot wished to do collectively,” says Watt, who helped with the hit alongside D’Mile and James Fauntleroy. “This was concerning the love of creating nice music.”
That want led to a sweeping, cinematic duet that has spent a number of weeks atop the Billboard World 200 and racked up 625 million on-demand official streams worldwide since its Aug. 16 launch (by Sept. 26), in line with Luminate.
“Seeing individuals reacting positively to it and it hitting them of their soul… it’s particular,” Watt says. “It is a ballad with all-live devices made to the human heartbeat. It’s not a formulaic track.”
He provides that Gaga and Mars have been within the studio collectively inside 24 hours of agreeing to collaborate, with Mars bringing within the preliminary thought for the track’s haunting vibe. Gaga fleshed it out on piano with Mars on guitar — precisely as they seem within the track’s retro Western music video (minus the costumes) — and stayed in a single day till it was good.
And whereas Watt says the session was a blur, he recollects a key part to that evening: discovering a melodic construction that permit Mars and Gaga sound like co-lead vocalists moderately than one individual harmonizing with the opposite. “When Gaga put her voice on prime of Bruno’s, that’s the second I bear in mind… listening to their two voices collectively, you get misplaced in it.”
It had the identical impact on Mars’ live performance crowd at L.A.’s Intuit Dome the evening the track dropped in August. As Gaga stepped onstage for the duet’s stay debut, Watt recollects watching the second unfold: “It was this wow issue of ‘Holy crap, [they’re] just like the Avengers of music.’ “
This story seems within the Oct. 5, 2024, situation of Billboard.
