Michael Bolton is gaga over one of his recent collaborators.

“I love her … I adore her,”

gushes the 57-year-old crooner about pop phenom Lady Gaga, who cowrote the song Murder My Heart on his new CD One World One Love.

“I didn’t know who Gaga was because her record hadn’t come out yet,” he says. “I had heard she was an excellent songwriter, but I didn’t know what it was going to be like working with her until I got to the

studio and we hit it off. We became friends immediately and had a lot in common immediately … and the more I got to know her, the more I liked her.”

On working with Lady Gaga:

When I met her and she started singing these melodies and lyrics to me, I realized I had a real artist in front of me. Someone who can actually sing and doesn’t need to be AutoTuned to sound good. She was the real thing. And she was so excited about what we were going to work on. I said, ‘It’s got to be something that’s going to kill people when they hear it.’ She said, ‘I have this idea for a title called Murder My Heart.’ So that’s how it began. We worked from 8 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. the first night, so there’s no question about her work ethic. And we did the same thing the next night. Then we finished the lyrics in London. Her mom was in London too, so I took the two of them out to dinner.

I remember her mother was a bit concerned whether her daughter was being hyped; whether the company was getting her too concerned about her career before her album came out. It’s funny; cut from that moment to four months later, when she obviously surpassed her mother’s expectations and became huge. That’s great. I love to see someone that focused who already has that vision of her career. People compare her to a new Madonna, a young Madonna, but I think she has the reins of her career more than when Madonna started out. She’s in on every aspect, from songwriting production to what the next video’s going to look like. She’s the epitome of an artist.