Songfacts®:

• Lady Gaga sings on this foot-stomping ode to Americana of her craving for a cowboy-type lover. She fantasises about "a real wild man" like John Wayne. The New York singer penned the song with Joanne producers Mark Ronson and BloodPop plus Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme.
• At the end of the second verse Gaga' appears to reference her split from fiancé Taylor Kinney in July 2016
  
  Charged up, 'cause the man's on a mission
  1-2 ya, the gears are shiftin'
  He called, I cried, we broke
  Racin' through the moonlight
  
  The singer blamed their breakup on long-distance and busy schedule issues.
• Gaga uses the image of John Wayne to describe her desire for a dangerous lover. Other songs that reference Hollywood's most famous cowboy include:
  
  "John Wayne Is Big Leggy" by Haysi Fantayzee
  
  "Summer Of John Wayne" by Tom McRae
  
  "The John Wayne" by Little Green Cars
  
  Plus Paula Cole famously asked "Where is my John Wayne" on her 1996 hit single, "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?"
• The action-packed music video was filmed by Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund, who also shot Gaga's "Telephone" clip. There's a car chase, Gaga riding a horse, explosions and flying beer cans.
  
  Gaga did many of the stunts herself. "I won't tell you which ones I didn't do, but I will tell you that that's me the whole time on the car, when I'm on top of the car going really fast," she told Zane Lowe on Beats 1. "I was in high heels going from the trunk to the top of the car and then flying into the front seat. My mother, she was literally screaming at me. She was like, 'You have to do the Super Bowl!'"