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Lady Gaga sat down with Stephen Colbert for a deep dive on her career, her earliest days performing in New York City, her desire to start a family, and her perfect bagel order on The Late Show. She also passed judgment on Colbert’s efforts to pull off some of her most famous looks. 

The interview took place at the Bitter End, the famed NYC nightclub where Gaga first started performing as a 14-year-old. For the occasion, Gaga shared some fliers from her earliest performance — when she was still using her real name Stefani Germanotta — as well as other ephemera, like a clipboard for interested fans to write down their names and emails, as well as a photo from right before she signed her first record deal. 

Gaga also spoke about how she came to adopt her stage name around this time, describing the persona as a kind of “creative armor.” The Mayhem artist explained: “Creating Lady Gaga was a way for me to become something that I felt I didn’t already have inside of me. Sort of like the star I always wanted to be. I knew I had musical talent and I had things I wanted to say, but I was just deeply insecure my whole childhood. So, I created this other thing to give me wings. And it was also kind of born after some really tough experiences… professional and personal. It was so hard that I changed my name.” 

Despite the protection this persona afforded her, Gaga said the early days of her career as a pop star and navigating the rigors of the music industry were still extremely difficult. “I white-knuckled my way through a very long period of my career,” she said. “I just had my head down and just worked and worked and worked.”

And while figuring out how to deal with fame was tough, Gaga admitted that the more difficult conflict ultimately turned out to be that between Gaga and Stefani. “Figuring out how to integrate those two things, psychologically, for me, that was my big forever work,” she said. 

Elsewhere in the interview, Gaga praised Colbert’s efforts to photoshop himself into some of her most famous looks, including the dark bangs and the Lady in Red from “Abracadabra.” She also spoke about growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and then moving to the Lower East Side, picked her favorite NYC institutions, flatly declined Colbert’s dare to rank the NYC boroughs (“Not a chance, this is a trap”), and shared her bagel order: “So there’s two bagel orders,” she sagely explained. “There’s the TBB — toasted butter bagel. Just like, easy, walking, TBB. Or, lox, cream cheese, tomato, salt, pepper.” 

Near the end of the interview, Gaga spoke about welcoming her fiancé, Michael Polansky, into her creative process. Colbert also asked Gaga what kind of projects she was interested in taking on next, such as Broadway, prompting her to reveal, “I would like to do many things. But what I really want is to be a mom. That’s my next starring role, I hope.”