Not only are we celebrating 30 years of Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy, 10 years ago today, Lady Gaga released the lead single from her second studio album, Born This Way.
Written by Gaga and Jeppe Laursen, who produced it along with Fernando Garibay and DJ White Shadow, the anthemic title track was part-mixed and recorded in Studio Three by David Russell, assisted by Pete Hutchings.
Following the stratospheric success of Just Dance, Pokerface and Bad Romance, the pressure was on for Lady Gaga when she began working on the lead single for her second full studio release. Gaga penned Born This Way while touring the UK with The Monster Ball in 2010, revealing to a fan on Twitter in 2011 that it happened while she was in Liverpool and Manchester: “I started writing Born This Way in Manchester + Liverpool. I knew it had to be the first single. It still gets me every time.”
“I wrote it in ten fucking minutes,” she told Vogue magazine, “and it is a completely magical message song. And after I wrote it, the gates just opened, and the songs kept coming. It was like an immaculate conception.”
At the time, the song became the fastest single in history to reach sales of 1,000,000 copies worldwide, hitting that milestone in just five days. It’s opening week sales in the US also marked the biggest first weekly digital sales figure by a female artist, beating the previous record held by Britney Spears’ track Hold It Against Me. Born This Way was also the 1000th song to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US.
