“Shallow” is a song performed by American singer Laady Gaga and American actor and filmmaker Bradley Cooper. It was released through Interscoope Records in September 2018, as the lead single from the soundtrack to the 2018 musical romantic drama film, A Star is Born. “Shallow” was written by Gaga with Andrew Wyatt, Anthony Rossomando and Mark Ronson, and produced by Gaga with Benjamin Rice. The song is heard three times in the film, most prominently during a sequence when Cooper’s character Jackson Maine invites Gaga’s character Ally to perform it onstage with him. The scene was filmed in front of a live audience at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.
“Shallow” is a pivotal moment in A Star Is Born, since it speaks about Ally and Jackson’s conversations. Gaga wrote it from Ally’s point of view with the self-aware lyrics asking each other if they are content being who they are. It’s a power ballad that blends rock, country and folk-pop, finding Gaga and Cooper trading verses and gradually moves towards the climactic final chorus with a vocal run by Gaga. The recording is interspersed with the sound of audience noise and applause. Gaga premiered it on DJ Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show while giving an interview about the film. An accompanying music video was also released, showing both Gaga’s and Cooper’s characters singing “Shallow” together onstage, interspersed with scenes from A Star Is Born.
From its release, “Shallow” received universal acclaim and is considered among the best songs from any movie soundtrack of all time by many critics. “Shallow” was also seen by many commentators as assertion of Gaga’s status in the entertainment industry. An article from Billboard regarding the 100 best musical bridges of the 21st century featured “Shallow” at number six, stating “the Oscar and Grammy winner starts off as a sweet, yet somber back and forth between a boy and a girl. But the guttural bridge launches “Shallow” off the deep end and into iconic territory. In the film, it’s the precise moment that Ally’s star is born. In the real world, it further cemented Gaga’s legacy.”
Commercially, the song topped the charts in more than twenty countries and reached the top ten elsewhere. The song entered the UK Singles Chart at number 13 with 20,425 units sold and reached number six the following week. It sold another 36,952 units, becoming Gaga’s 12th top-ten song in the UK. For the week ending November 1, 2018, “Shallow” reached the top of the UK Singles Chart for two weeks becoming her fifth number one and Cooper’s first. The same week, A Star Is Born also returned to the top of the UK Albums Chart, giving Gaga and Cooper a chart double, this being Gaga’s third. The BPI awarded a quadruple platinum certification to the track for accumulating 2,400,000 equivalent sales units in the UK.
“Shallow” is widely considered to be both one of the best songs of the 2010s decade and one of the best movie tracks of all time. Both Jon Pareles and Jon Caramanica of The New York Times ranked “Shallow” as the sixth best song of 2018. Pareles called it a “perfectly calibrated power ballad” which achieved “movie-musical triple duty as love song, vocal showcase and plot pivot”. Rolling Stone listed it as the second-best song of 2018 and the 14th-best song of the 2010s; their writer, Brittany Spanos, called it a “classic-rock fantasy where the 1990s never ended”
