Songfacts®:

• Gaga wrote this ballad for her father, Joseph Germanotta, in frustration because he wouldn't seek treatment for a heart condition.
  
  "I've known about my father's condition for about 15 years. He told me whatever happens, happens," she told New York's Z-100 radio station. "I was getting ready to lose my dad and I wrote this song."
• Joseph finally got a heart operation on October 22, 2009. "My Daddy had open-heart surgery today," Gaga Tweeted. "And after long hours, and lots of tears, they healed his broken heart, and mine. Speechless."
  
  The song was released a few weeks later on her second album, The Fame Monster.
• Unusually for Lady Gaga, this Ron Fair-produced track features a guitar.
• As with the other songs on The Fame Monster, Gaga is fighting a monster of some sort. In this instance it's her fear of death - specifically her father's.
  
  "My mom called me and I was very depressed. I was on tour and I couldn't leave, so I went into the studio and I wrote this song 'Speechless,' and it's about these phone calls," she explained. "My dad used to call me after he'd had a few drinks and I wouldn't know what to say. I was speechless and I just feared that I would lose him and I wouldn't be there."
• Lady Gaga has struggled with bouts of depression when touring, but out of her sadness came this song. When Jam! Music asked her to name her lowest point of 2009, she replied: "The lowest point was in Australia in May. I was overwhelmingly sad, and I didn't know why, because I had all these things to be happy about. I went to the studio and played for hours, and I wrote what is going to be the greatest record of my career, a beautiful song about my father. I remember watching the mascara tears flood the ivories and I thought, 'It's OK to be sad.' I've been trained to love my darkness."
• GaGa discussed this song with The Sunday Times December 6, 2009: "It's very loving in one sense, but in another sense it's quite ruthless. I think my favorite lines on the whole album are:
  
  And I know that it's complicated
  But I'm a loser in love
  So baby, raise a glass to mend
  All the broken hearts
  Of all my wrecked-up friends
  
  So I'm writing about my dad, but not only from my perspective, from the perspective of my mother, and women and men all over the world whose hearts are broken for whatever reason. For me, the whole album lives in that lyric."