Lady Gaga Reinvents ‘Abracadabra’ With Rock Guitars While Dressed as a Caged Bird at Grammys

Hot off five nights of bringing the Mayhem Ball Tour to Tokyo, Lady Gaga was back in Los Angeles to perform a rock version of “Abracadabra” at the Grammys on Sunday night.

Gaga, flanked by a band that included drummer Josh Freese, spent much of the performance behind a keyboard setup. In a typical eccentric outfit, she was dressed in red bird feathers with her face enclosed in a cage-like contraption.

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Gaga came into the night with seven nominations, including all three of the top categories: record of the year (“Abracadabra”), album of the year (“Mayhem”) and song of the year (“Abracadabra”). She was also up for best pop solo performance (“Disease”), best pop vocal album (“Mayhem”), best dance pop recording (“Abracadabra”), and best traditional pop vocal album (for the “Joker”-related album “Harlequin”).

The second leg of her Mayhem Ball Tour starts later this month.

At last year’s ceremony, Gaga and Bruno Mars teamed up to offer an emotional rendition of the Mamas and the Papas classic “California Dreamin’,” dedicated to those affected by the devastating L.A. wildfires.

Earlier this week, Gaga condemned ICE at one of her Tokyo shows, saying, “I want to take a second to talk about something that’s extremely important to me. Something important to people all over the world and especially in America right now. In a couple of days, I’m gonna be heading home and my heart is aching thinking about the people, the children, the families, all over America, who are being mercilessly targeted by ICE. I’m thinking about all of their pain and how their lives are being destroyed right in front of us.”

That sentiment has been echoed by other artists at the Grammys, with Billie Eilish, Justin Bieber and others wearing “ICE Out” pins on the red carpet, Olivia Dean dedicating her best new artist win to immigrants and Bad Bunny delivering a passionate speech: “We are not savage, we are not animals, we are not aliens, we are humans and we are Americans.”