Lady Gaga’s loud, proud, and history-making album Born This Way turned 10 this May, and the singer cannot stop celebrating.
On May 23, Gaga honored the newly declared “Born This Way Day” in West Hollywood, where Mayor Lindsey P. Horvath granted her the key to the city. That same day, Gaga took to Instagram to honor Black gay activist Carl Bean, who she said inspired the title track with his 1977 disco song that declared, “I’m happy, I’m carefree and I’m gay/I was born this way.”
Over the past couple weeks, Gaga has also been teasing the June 18 release of Born This Way: The Tenth Anniversary, a special edition that will include the album’s fourteen original tracks (in new packaging) as well as “reimagined versions” of the songs “by incredible artists who both represent and advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community,”as Gaga explained on Twitter.
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Today, Interscope Records dropped a cover of the album’s title track by gay country artist Orbille Peck. Called “Born This Way (The Country Road Version),” it's a slowed down take on the original that of course includes Peck’s soothing country twang. This pared down version is less of an unbridled dance floor anthem, as was the original, and more of a country ballad, powerful in its own new way.
It is notable that Gaga selected a country singer to perform a song that so unapologetically celebrates queer identities, as the country music industry remains known as a less than welcoming place for queer performers — though out country artists like Peck and Brooke Eden are fighting to changing that. “If I want to make it country baby, it’s ok,” Peck sings on the new version, “I was born, I was born, I was born this way.”
Back in 2011, the Born This Way song debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for six weeks. It also beat Britney Spears’s record for most downloads in the first week by a female artist (Gaga’s record was eventually broken by Taylor Swift). At the time, Born This Way was also the fastest selling song in iTunes history.
In May, Gaga released a remix of another track from the special edition, Judas, for which she collaborated with Big Freedia.
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