Show notes
jD, Matt, and Thomas welcome Veronica Villanueva to the program to discuss the career and bona fides of one Lady Gaga. Transcript: [0:43] All right, thank you so much, Doug DeNats. It is great to be here with you all in the SNL Hall of Fame.Welcome to the SNL Hall of Fame podcast. My name is JD. It is fantastic to be here with you today.We've got a great show. There's no doubt about it that this is gonna be a cooker.This is gonna be one that you're gonna talk about and water cooler about.It is an episode where Thomas is in conversation with Veronica Villanueva, a first-timer here in the SNL Hall of Fame, and they are gonna be talking about Lady Gaga, so there's that.Now, before you come inside, I would ask you to take note of the mat in front of you that says, wipe them, and wipe those feet.We gotta keep this place clean, because the SNL Hall of Fame podcast is a weekly affair where each episode we take a deep dive into the career of a former cast member, host, musicalguest, or writer, and add them to the ballot for your consideration.Once the nominees have been announced, we turn to you, the listener, to vote for the most deserving and help determine who will be enshrined for perpetuity in the hall. And that's howwe play the game.It's just that simple. You listen to the podcast.You enjoy the podcast, hopefully. You subscribe to the podcast. You share the podcast.[2:12] All those good things, right? The podcast is here for you to enjoy and listen to the arguments that are made on behalf of the nominees.And then it's your turn to vote. We open up voting. We're gonna open up voting for about seven days this year.We've done some experimentation with longer periods of time and it just doesn't net the results ultimately.85% of the votes come in in the first week, so we may as well go with that.Actually, last year was an anomaly though.Last year we got a bunch near the end and could have skewed the results, could have skewed the results because it was definitely a surprising induction last year.So there's that. This year, however, we aim to please. We've got...this is our 12th...no, this is our 11th nominee, because the first episode was The Draft.So this is our 11th nominee. It's in the musical guest category, which tends to be a category that is ignored.[3:21] And again, I'll, I'll say it, I'll get on my soapbox and I'll say, I think that the musical guest is a, is a key component of the show.And if you want evidence of that, look no, look no closer than this weekend's past episode, where we were, where we were given the Foo Fighters, the Foo Fighters are a major, major actand, and playing in a theater that small, a small, a soundstage that small.[3:50] For a band that big is just wonderful. There was part of me that was like, should I go down? Should this be the week that I go down and get standby tickets?Should this be the week? Because I saw Nate Bregazzi live last New Year's Eve, and he was wonderful.So I'm really thinking that it could could be a lot of fun.But alas, I will stay in Toronto in the fall weather. And so there's that.Now let's go to our friend, Matt Ardill, as he welcomes us to his corner.Track 3:[4:25] Hey, thanks for having me, Jamie.Track 2:[4:28] It's great that you're here. How are you doing?Track 3:[4:29] Things are going well. They're going great with me. How about you?Track 2:[4:31] Things are wonderful. What have we got today on the docket?Track 3:[4:35] Now I am, I wouldn't say I'm a little monster, but I am a big fan of the next person that we're gonna talk about.Can't wait to hear the show about Stephanie Joanne Angelina Germanotta.Stephanie Joanne Angelina Germanotta. Yes. AKA Lady Gaga.That's right. Height, five foot one, March 28th, 1986. So it's her birthday, which makes me feel very old.I am older than Lady Gaga by over a decade. That scares me.But she was born and raised in New York City and has released seven albums, three EPs, has 48 acting credits, including her most important performance as Lady Gaga in the Lady Gagaand the Muppets Holiday Spectacular.She's also composed 29 songs for films, has 299 soundtrack credits, 12 producer credits, six writer credits, five director credits, and 11 music department credits.She is a busy lady.[5:42] Nicknamed Gaga by producer Robert Fusari, after being told she reminded him of the Queen song, Radio Gaga.A big fan of Queen, she took that as a compliment, and when it came time to release her first album, she tweaked that into Lady Gaga, as the lady added a bit of class, and the Gagaimplied a bit of wackiness, and it stuck.An artist from a young age, she attended the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute, Circle in the Square Theatre School and the TischSchool of the Arts.She was a member of fame from the get-go.She started young, performing as a teenager at open mics and studying at Collaborative Arts Project 21 through NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, while also go-go dancing to Make EndsMeet.She was discovered by Akon.Gaga was performing a burlesque show called Lady Gaga and the Starlight Review.DJing and singing. You can actually still find some of those shows on YouTube.She learned to play piano at the age of four, wrote her first ballad at 13, and was one of 20 people to gain early admission to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.[6:58] Due to her early soul work, she bleached her hair blonde after repeatedly being mistaken for Amy Winehouse.One of her early acting opportunities was being considered for the role of Catwoman, Selina Kyle in 2012's Dark Knight Rises, which did not move forward.But she is now joining the Batman universe in the Joker sequel, Dua Follet, as Dr.Harley Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, which honestly, I, as a Bat fan, am totally Bat-tacularly insanely happy for it. I think she's going to be great.[7:38] She went sober after a hip injury, had her addicted to men's in 2013.Has a very close relationship with fellow piano pop star Elton John.That's not just for show, she is in fact being named the godmother to Elton John and David Furnish's son, Zachary and Elijah.A humanitarian, she founded the Born This Way Foundation to support humanitarian causes and donated the profits from her 2009 Fame Ball Tour to raise money for the Odyssey CharterSchool and elementary schools in Los Angeles hit by budget cuts.Her second album, Born This Way, was the seventh album to sell one million copies in one week, and she's the fifth woman to sell one million copies in one week after Whitney Houston,Britney Spears, Norah Jones, and Taylor Swift.A style provocateur with outrageous outfits and 14 tattoos, she constantly pushes boundaries with stellar success, having four Oscar noms, 17 AMAs, and hundreds of other nominationsfor Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and Grammys, just to name a few of her other nominations.[8:48] And most importantly, when attending the Oscars in 2009, she went with dreamboat Kermit the Frog, which I am sure made Piggy furious.Track 4:[9:29] All right, Matthew and JD, thank you so much. We are talking this week about another musical guest that I'm really excited about.During our draft over the summer to choose season four nominees, I selected someone who I thought just had such memorable performances on SNL.SNL caught this person at the right time in their careers. I thought it'd be a perfect topic.We are talking about of course Lady Gaga and for that joining me big time Lady Gaga fan, someone who I've known since we were five years old, but someone who maybe owes meanother apology for an incident from when we were kids. Yeah, yes, yes.I'm sorry, Tom, please forgive me.I often tell the story. I'm sorry, I chose you and I didn't mean to.[10:24] Yeah, we'll tell the world that Veronica, our guest today is my good friend Veronica Villanueva and Veronica decided to see what it would be like to kick a young man in his nutswhen we were kids and I was the target.Well, let me just put a little backstory to it. All the girls were talking about how to kick a boy in his, between the legs and see what happens.And I thought, who else then other than my good friend, Tommy.And I walked right up to you, I did it.You perceived to scream without making noise and fell to the ground and began screaming. I was like, I'm so sorry, please don't tell the duty.So just know that I chose you because I thought like this was something I could share with you because I don't know the outcome. And now I still have nightmares. So what did you learn?Don't do that again. Not cool. Don't hurt your friends. Figure it out.Find out more information.So yeah, I'm sorry. information. So yeah, I'm sorry. It's okay.I know it was out of love. And thank you so much, really.Who knew who anybody would ever use that in a sentence? Thank you.[11:27] Thank you. You taught me a lesson, actually. It was you. I'm sorry.Oh, my gosh. Good times growing up. Yeah. Thank you so much, Veronica, for being here. We are, we have known each other since we were five years old.Veronica, you're like a sister to me. So this is like a real honor to have you on this call.Definitely. Yep. 100%. Been through the ups and downs, hanging, you know, sneak out in high school, the beer pyramid, you know, everything.[11:55] Beer pyramid. Our listeners are gonna, they have one image of me and then they hear beer pyramid.It might fit. I don't know. So yeah, growing up, we both knew like, we kind of chatted, talked comedy a lot.And we've, we had, I remember talking comedy theory and stuff over coffee a few times here and there.So we both grew up just huge comedy fans and everything.[12:21] I wanted to know, because we haven't really talked specifically about SNL, so I want to know what your relationship to SNL is as a viewer.Yeah, I mean, as far as I can remember, growing up, I didn't grow up with cable TV, so I was kind of in the shadows with all that stuff, so pretty much PBS and the news and whatever,sitcoms, syndication, watching some of that.But then my older sister, she really liked Saturday Night Live, but in our family, it was like, like, hush, hush, you're not allowed to watch that. It's, you know, you're too young for it. So ofcourse, that made me want to see it even more.[12:56] So I would, you know, stay up late, wait for the parents to go to bed and start watching Saturday Night Live.And really, I want to say it has to be in the late 80s, 86, 87, with like Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey, John Lovitz, like just seeing all their sketches and their songs, everything like that, Iwas just so intrigued by it.And I think as I continue to grow up and I was able to, you know, it was a weekly thing for me.And then slowly my sisters, we all started watching it. So it really became like a weekly thing that we watched Saturday Night Live. And I mean, for me, Saturday Night Live has justalways represented what's current in the news, struggles in the world, struggles in our country.And then also like just the music hand down, it's like, well, if they're on Saturday Night Live, I need to listen to this band or I need to check out that album.Like, I felt like it was so influential to myself and just, you know, of coming of age and then as a young kid and then now as an adult, like just seeing the evolution of the show.So just seeing like this group of people, like a family, of course, like Lauren Michaels is the daddy and like he just takes care of everybody.And it's just like, it just feels like an American staple. So for me, it just really helped influence like a lot of my sense of humor and what was popular and everything like that. And so that'show it all began and it's going.Yeah, similar for me. I know it just got in my blood like in the late eighties, early nineties.[14:16] And musically, because today we're talking about a musical guest, and it influenced a lot of what I liked musically as well. You could probably relate, Veronica.Nirvana, Pearl Jam. We saw all these cool bands come through SNL and it kind of informed a lot of my music choices too.I agree 100%. I think like especially with our age, you know, growing up in the 90s and just seeing that whole entire going from like, I remember when it's like musical guests were likemore like Poppy and just like, you know, Paul Simon and like just kind of some old school or just more, you know, well known artists and then all of a sudden the 90s and SNL they werejust throwing out all this grunge music and yeah I remember Pearl Jam and like Don't Call Me Daughter and like that performance in itself always stood out to me so much and and RedHot Chili Peppers you know so yes and it was just a way for us to you know our high school years and it's awesome.There's a lot of performances that over the years on SNL that have really just made me stop like a lot of times with musical I'll go like let the dogs out or I'll go, you know, get a snack ordo something.[15:21] But every now and then there's a musical guest that just, I have to sit and watch because it's just visually captivating just something about it.Or I wasn't, maybe it wasn't even a fan to begin with. And they just sort of drew me in and our topic today, Lady Gaga, fits that for me.But I know you, you've been a Lady Gaga fan probably for quite a while. How'd that happen?And, you know, it was one of those things that, kind of going back to us growing up, you know, we were like.You know we graduated high school in 2000 and during that time the end of the 90s you know really we started to see this movement of like pop you know and Britney Spears, ChristinaAguilera, you know all these like in sync Backstreet Boys, you know all this kind of bubblegum pop music coming out and that was like stark contrast from what I was used to.To me, I felt like this was just more, like, you know, kind of gimmicky and, you know, I just, they were no, I was so used to these artists writing their own songs, playing instruments.It was based off the performance and the message, where now all of a sudden, here I am going into college and there's teeny boppers and all that stuff.And it just wasn't my, it wasn't my bag. It wasn't my jam.[16:34] And so now, and of course, don't get me wrong, some of those artists continue to put out, you know, Green Day, you know, all these things, putting out music throughout the years,but then come, you know, 2008, 2009, I remember that New Kids on the Block, talking about teeny boppers, you know, fifth grade, NKTLB, you know, was going on tour again.And it's like, oh my gosh, like baby Veronica was just like, this is amazing, you know? And of course, I don't think they came through New Mexico during that time, but everybody wastalking about that this Lady Gaga was going to open up for them.And I was like, hmm, like, I think maybe I had heard something, you know.Then I remember seeing the video for Just Dance, and I was just like, wow, you know, this woman, I like her style, like, she's like, like, she's not teeny bopper, it's pop music, but it's likemature and a really good sound to it.[17:30] And like a con was that video and I was like okay, you know like let's see where this goes, you know, And so from there, I kind of like had my radar on her, but I didn't know.And then finally, when the music video for paparazzi came out, I was just taken away.Like that to me was a really big turning point because like she was weird and she was genuine about it. And weird isn't a bad thing. It's just she was different.She was original and unique.And I could see her,…
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