Lady Gaga’s upcoming new album is called “Joanne.”PA Wire

One autumn day, in early November 2013, Lady Gaga rolled up to the SiriusXM Radio studios in New York to give an extended town hall-style interview to promote her new album, “Artpop.”

In front of an audience of hard-core fans and competition winners, she proceeded to go on about the concepts behind it — including a long-winded demonstration of the interactive app that came with the album, the involvement of modern artist Jeff Koons, and how she felt “Artpop” was a progression of the Warholian concept of pop art.

It was all a bit too much for one devotee in the room, who simply yawned in her face. Gaga had jumped the shark. She had already spent three tiring months promoting the album, appearing in public wearing 10-inch platform heels and on one occasion, a bizarre chicken outfit.

When “Artpop” finally arrived to her bored and exhausted fan base, Gaga was already overexposed. And the album failed to deliver on the prerelease hype and hoo-ha.

“One of the reasons people weren’t into ‘Artpop’ is because there was too much distraction,” says Lori Majewski, co-host of “Feedback,” a flagship show on SiriusXM’s new channel Volume. “By calling it ‘Artpop,’ she was telling people, ‘This isn’t for you.’ That was a mistake.”

It’s a mistake that Gaga (a k a Stefani Germanotta) is looking to rectify with her new album, “Joanne,” out Friday. Her fifth collection is a clear departure from the overblown “Artpop.”

This time, the 30-year-old has given MoMA a wide berth, ignoring “art” and looking instead to her family and friends for inspiration — seeking to create something more personal and relatable. “I wanted to write songs that would speak to a woman or a man that thought they could never relate to someone like me,” she recently told Rolling Stone.

Nowhere is the intensely personal influence more evident than the album’s delicate and raw title track. “Joanne” is not only one of Gaga’s middle names, but it’s also the name of her father Joe’s sister, who died on Dec. 18, 1974, at the age of 18. Gaga has the date of her Aunt Joanne’s death tattooed on her arm, and the Upper West Side restaurant Joe, which opened in 2012, is also named after her.

Even though Gaga herself never knew her aunt, Joanne’s life has cast a shadow over the Germanotta clan. Earlier this year, Gaga performed her powerful, Oscar-nominated song “Til It Happens to You” (about the experience of rape survivors) at the Producers Guild Awards, when she explained that Joanne was herself a victim of sexual assault while at college. It affected Joanne so greatly that she contracted lupus, which eventually claimed her life.

On the track “Joanne,” Gaga sings, “Every part of my aching heart/Needs you more than the angels do,” seemingly from the perspective of her father, tenderly addressing his sister. Last month, she told Beats 1 DJ Zane Lowe that the song was the “true heart and soul of the record.”

“I heard from someone on the inside that when Gaga finished the track, Jimmy Iovine said to her, ‘You’ve just written [something with the emotional gravitas of] ‘Landslide’ [by Fleetwood Mac],” says Majewski, who hosted Gaga as a guest on her show this week.

In the post-“Artpop” era, Gaga has also clearly spent a great deal of time re-evaluating who her friends are. One of her closest allies has become crooner Tony Bennett, who worked with a rejuvenated-sounding Gaga on the 2014 album of jazz duets “Cheek to Cheek.” In his upcoming book “Just Getting Started” (out next month), Bennett reveals, “There were people who pretended to be her friends, but mostly wanted to attach themselves to her trajectory into the stars — and her money.”

Now Gaga has whittled down her crew to a very select few, and they also seep into the album. The “Joanne” bonus track “Grigio Girls” is written about Sonja Dunham, her longtime creative director at the Haus of Gaga, who is suffering from cancer. Recalling a night out drinking wine with another mutual friend, Gaga told Yahoo Music, “We needed the time without her to cry about it, because we didn’t want to cry in front of her.”

“Joanne” is also a return to Gaga’s musician roots. During recording, she put in the hours practicing her vocals, playing piano, and even learning to play guitar. She also lined up a host of hip collaborators, producers and songwriters, including Mark Ronson, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and even Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. Rather than email their work to each other, Gaga spent long hours at the studio looking for real chemistry and, wisely, decided to tone down her wardrobe accordingly. “This time my style just stayed naturally at how I’ve been in the studio,” she told the Sunday Times of London. “You can’t make music with a bunch of boys who are staring at a lobster on your head. They are going to get distracted.”

Freed of her pseudo-surf-and-turf wardrobe, Gaga has also been promoting the more intimately themed “Joanne” in similarly intimate spaces. A special, three-date dive-bar tour kicked off in Nashville, Tenn., earlier this month, and saw her re-creating the spirit of her days playing open mikes on the Lower East Side. The constructed persona of Lady Gaga took a back seat at the gig, with the singer tellingly requesting that the crowd call her “Joanne.”

While Gaga has dug deep for this new batch of songs, the question of whether they will translate to hits is still unanswered. “Perfect Illusion” peaked at No. 15 and, five weeks after release, has almost dropped out of the Top 100 already. On Saturday, she’s scheduled to perform on “Saturday Night Live,” and Gaga is already booked for next February’s Super Bowl halftime show. (That show pretty much guarantees a spike in sales.)

But the music industry has changed so much since Gaga’s multimillion-selling 2008 debut “The Fame” that it would be unrealistic to expect success on that level. And for Gaga, that probably isn’t the point anyway.

“She’s a career artist,” says Majewski. “The songs from ‘The Fame’ were easily digestible. But she’s a more sophisticated songwriter now. Each time a true artist like her takes a risk, they grow. That’s why she’ll still be around in 30 years.”