Madonna: 'Born This Way' Is an 'Interesting Redo of My Song'

Lady Gaga and Madonna attend the Marc Jacobs Spring Fashion Show at the NY State Armory.

Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage for Marc Jacobs

Madonna addressed similarities between her 1989 smash "Express Yourself" and Lady Gaga's recent hit "Born This Way" in a new interview with Newsweek. "I thought, this is a wonderful way to redo my song," she said, recalling the first time she heard the hit early last year. "I mean, I recognized the chord changes. I thought it was . . . interesting."

Madonna's comments, though polite and essentially complimentary, certainly seem to undermine Gaga's songwriting and achievements. Nevertheless, the star emphasized in another recent interview on the BBC's Graham Norton Show that she feels a close kinship with Mother Monster. "When I first saw her I was really impressed by her. She was cool," she told Norton earlier this week. "She did remind me of me back in the day."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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