Lady Gaga on Mysterious Will.i.Am Dinner: What Happened

It was November 2023 when Lady Gaga and Will.i.am were spotted mysteriously leaving a restaurant with giant folders in their hands. A PopCrave tweet reported the occasion to be a “four-hour dinner,” and the pair of musicians were photographed leaving separately. At the time, fans — hungry for new music from Gaga — speculated that maybe something was in the works.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone about the album, Gaga finally addressed the encounter with her Black Eyed Peas friend.

“We were just hanging out!” Gaga says coyly.
What were in those folders?
“What were those folders? I don’t remember,” Gaga adds, pausing to think. “But we were probably just hanging out and talking about music.”

While Will.i.Am could not be reached for this story, he previously told The Mirror that “it was just a dinner” and that Gaga had told her about the projects she was working on, including Joker 2. “We talked about just creating. The importance of creating, and then I offered my service.”

Gaga and Will.i.am are longtime friends and collaborated on Artpop‘s “Fashion,” which Will.i.am co-produced and provided an outro for. The big-folder-encounter spawned a Reddit thread captioned “2010 pop music is coming back,” which was fitting foreshadowing for Gaga’s new album Mayhem. (Will wasn’t a part of it.)

While speaking to Rolling Stone about Mayhem, Gaga reflected on how her new album Mayhem inspired “peak confidence” in her. “I would say 2025 Lady Gaga is really inside of her artistry. I’m a lot more relaxed. I feel more comfortable in my own skin,” she said. “I’ve fully integrated, I’m both Lady Gaga and Stefani at the same time. And that’s a different feeling.”