Why Lady Gaga Almost Quit Being a Pop Star

— -- You might say this was the year Lady Gaga proved herself as more than just a meat dress-wearing pop star.

She wowed fans with her "Sound of Music" tribute at the Oscars, held her own with jazz icon Tony Bennett, landed a starring role on "American Horror Story: Hotel" and made strides to help struggling youth with her Born This Way foundation. It’s no wonder she scored Billboard’s Woman of the Year honor.

“It speaks volumes to me that I’m being recognized as Woman of the Year in 2015,” she told the magazine in a new cover story for the Women in Music issue. “This is the year I did what I wanted instead of trying to keep up with what I thought everyone else wanted from me.”

Her change in career trajectory came at just the right moment. Last year, after dealing with backlash for her 2013 album ARTPOP, she says she considered giving up on being a pop star entirely.

“At the end of 2014, my stylist asked, ‘Do you even want to be a pop star anymore?’" she recounted. "I looked at him and I go, ‘You know, if I could just stop this train right now, today, I would. I just can’t. [But] I need to get off now because I’m going to die.’"

But when the “whole industry” turned its back on her, Gaga said Elton John and Tony Bennett were the ones who encouraged her to stay true to herself. She explained she didn’t just want to be a “fashionable robot.”

“Can’t being an artist be enough? Is talent ever the thing?” she said she asked herself. “I think for Adele it is. I think for Bruno Mars it is. But that’s what I learned from working with Tony: If talent isn’t the thing, then you are way off-base.”

It’s knowledge she plans to embrace when entering a new decade -- her thirties.

“My birthday is in March, so these are the last moments of my twenties,” she says. “I want to show women they don’t need to try to keep up with the 19-year-olds and the 21-year-olds in order to have a hit. Women in music, they feel like they need to f****** sell everything to be a star. It’s so sad. I want to explode as I go into my thirties."