Lady Gaga wrote “Bloody Mary” in 2010 with Fernando Garibay and Paul “DJ White Shadow” Blair. Clinton Sparks, who co-produced the track, and DJ Snake, born William Grigahcine, are also credited as writers on the official arrangement, which lists all five names under “Roles.” Producer Garibay later told MTV News that the song grew out of a White Shadow track Gaga heard while the two were in Australia, and that she started singing a melody and lyrics over it almost immediately, a detail preserved by Songfacts.
From Album Cut to TikTok Hit: How “Bloody Mary” Found an Audience a Decade Late
“Born This Way” arrived on May 23, 2011, carrying religious imagery through cuts including “Judas” and “Black Jesus + Amen Fashion.” “Bloody Mary” pushed that material furthest. Gaga sings the song as Mary Magdalene watching the crucifixion, a concept she laid out to NME in 2011, before the album’s release: Magdalene, in Gaga’s telling, was someone both divine and fully human, strong enough to stand through the prophecy playing out but shaken by it in private – someone who, as Gaga put it, “must have cried too.” She returned to the same figure a decade later in a Deadline interview, saying she had been fascinated by Magdalene growing up and had always wanted to play her. The title works as a double reference. It reads as an allusion to Mary I of England, the Catholic queen remembered for executing Protestants, but it was also the name of a Rolls-Royce Gaga owned, and she described the song in a Facebook post as being “about living halfway between reality and fantasy,” per Songfacts.
Ann Powers noticed the same religious throughline in her 2011 review for NPR, describing Gaga as “revisiting the demons every feminist artist has faced” and pointing to Christianity in “Bloody Mary” specifically as one of those inherited fights. None of that critical notice turned into chart action. Interscope never worked “Bloody Mary” as a single in the US, and it sat as an album cut for over a decade.
That changed in late 2022. Netflix’s “Wednesday” premiered that November, and a clip of Jenna Ortega dancing as the title character, originally scored to The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” started circulating on TikTok. Users began swapping the audio for a sped-up “Bloody Mary” instead, and the edit spread even though the song never appears in the show itself. Gaga posted her own version of the dance that December under the title “Bloody Wednesday,” a clip that Billboard reported racked up more than 12 million views on its own. By January 2023, Billboard reported, “Bloody Mary” had logged its first-ever entry on the Hot 100, debuting at No. 68 more than eleven years after “Born This Way” came out. The outlet counted it as Gaga’s 36th career entry on the chart, noting that by then the song had already soundtracked close to four million TikTok videos. Billboard also reported that three months later, it reached No. 10 on Pop Airplay, becoming “Born This Way”‘s fourth song to hit that chart’s top ten, a full decade after the rest of them got there.
The story kept folding back on itself. Gaga opened her Coachella headlining set in April 2025 with “Bloody Mary,” staged as a gothic set piece in a blood-red gown, Billboard reported. That September, she appeared in “Wednesday” Season 2 as Rosaline Rotwood – a role that, per series co-creator Alfred Gough in an interview with Deadline, came together after her team reached out and she did the dance herself.
Reading the “Bloody Mary” Score
The official score lists the key as C major and A minor, and the page backs that up. There are no sharps or flats in the signature. All the harmonic color comes from accidentals written in as needed. The intro runs Am, Dm, Am/C, Dm, Dm6, E, a six-chord unit that keeps circling back to A minor while the bass climbs from C through D to E before resolving home. That E major chord is the detail to watch. A strict A natural minor scale puts an E minor chord in that spot. The score writes it major instead, meaning the third is G-sharp rather than G-natural. That’s a harmonic-minor borrowing, and it’s what gives the intro its slightly unstable, church-adjacent sound before the vocal even enters.
The choruses drop that borrowed tone entirely. “I won’t cry for you” and the “still be Bloody Mary” hook sit over Em, F, G, Am, diatonic to A natural minor with no raised leading tone anywhere in the progression. The verse material leans on that borrowed E major for tension, and the chorus resolves into plain natural-minor harmony for release. It’s a small detail, but it tracks with how the song is built to feel: tense build, open release. The wordless “dum dum da di da” vocalize that closes out the arrangement runs on that same Em-F-G-Am chorus harmony, working as a second hook with the words stripped out.
There’s also a small dramatic device worth pointing out for anyone playing through the arrangement. Heading into the second chorus, the score drops to N.C., no chord, under a single held “Ah!” before the band comes back in. Cutting the harmony out from under the voice for one beat is a simple trick, but it’s an effective one, and it’s the kind of detail that’s easy to miss reading a lead sheet and easy to hear once you know it’s there.
Tempo is marked “Moderate Pop feel” at quarter note equals 103. The full arrangement runs 69 measures across six pages, clocking in at 3:53, formatted for piano, vocal, and guitar. The publishing credits printed at the bottom of the score, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, House of Gaga Publishing, Universal Music Corp, Warner-Tamerlane, Garibay Music Publishing, and EMI Blackwood Music, reflect how many hands ended up on the copyright once Sparks and DJ Snake were added after the album’s release.
