Lady Gaga did not take anything for granted while making her new jazz album, Love for Sale, with legend Tony Bennett.

In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music First Listen, Gaga says it was an emotional process knowing it would probably be the last time she’d get to make music with the 95-year-old Tony, who has been battling Alzheimer’s disease for the past four years.

“You know, I can promise you that every note that I sang, I was thinking about how this was Tony’s last album,” Gaga says.

She adds that she also channeled Tony’s advice to always “go deeper,” and found new meaning in the words of some classic jazz standards.

“It would be about thinking about how during his life and after his life, he will be with me always [and] that he will be a part of myself,” she explains. “…And it would be about having that in my mind with every word, having that in my mind with every harmony, having that in my mind with every musical change that I choose to make based on what he does. That’s going deeper.”

Gaga explained she quite literally has Tony “under her skin” — she has a tattoo on her arm of Miles Davis‘ trumpet that Tony drew and signed.

“I really think that the gift that Tony is giving me is that with 60 years between us, he beckoned that I not see his age, that I just hear his voice, that I know his heart,” she says.

Love for Sale is out now.