Lady Gaga prepares for tour

By MESFIN FEKADU

AP Music Writer

NEW YORK

Whether it’s at a bar or baseball park, Lady Gaga says she’s going to give every performance her all.

The singer will launch a summer tour with stops at arenas and stadiums across the globe (including Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland on Aug. 23, and PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on Nov. 20), and she’s also returning to the Dive Bar Tour with Bud Light to perform a show in Las Vegas on July 13.

She called the first bar crawl, completed last fall around the release of “Joanne,” a deep experience.

“For what it’s worth, when I got up there, I totally forgot where we were and I just went into performance mode,” she said in a phone interview. “For me, no matter how small a venue is, you don’t perform it differently than you perform at a big venue, that’s not fair to the fans.”

Last year’s tour included a stop at The Bitter End, the New York City bar where Gaga performed before her pop-star days. The new Dive Bar Tour also will include shows in Los Angeles (July 26) and New Orleans (August 30), to be headlined by other artists, who will be announced soon.

Gaga, 31, will launch a world tour Aug. 1 in Vancouver, B.C. It includes stops at baseball parks such as Citi Field in New York, AT&T Park in San Francisco, Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway Park in Boston.

Now that she’s wrapped filming “A Star is Born” with Bradley Cooper – an experience she called “life changing,” “wonderful” and “inspiring” – she’s focusing on the massive tour.

“This one will be a little bit different,” she said. “I also like to change things up. I have some other ideas about how I’d like to perform some of my fans’ classics.”

Part of switching it up comes from the sound of “Joanne,” which includes rock, country and slower songs compared with Gaga’s past electro- flavored dance hits.