Lady Gaga has arrived unadorned before; over the last couple of years, it has become something of a default mode: her collaboration with Tony Bennett on the album “Cheek to Cheek,” which won the Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album last year, or her “Sound of Music” tribute at the Oscars the same year. These performances were ostentatious in a different way — nude makeup, but makeup nonetheless.

These moves, and “Joanne,” too, serve as an overcorrection to the garish eccentricity of “Artpop,” her last album, which flopped. Except garish eccentricity is one of Lady Gaga’s comfort zones, and that album’s lack of success had more to do with overemphasizing the nonmusical aspects of Gaga’s character than her lack of fluency with music.

So, on “Joanne,” she goes on a fishing expedition for inspiration. No pop album in recent memory has featured such a wide array of collaborations that strip those collaborators of their particular charms. Mark Ronson appears throughout this album, as a songwriter and producer, but there’s precious little of his reliable funk. “Dancin’ in Circles,” a songwriting collaboration with Beck, sounds like a No Doubt demo. Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age plays guitar on a handful of songs, but none with anything close to his usual ferocity. The Florence Welch duet “Hey Girl” sounds like Motown, but Ms. Welch’s singing isn’t nearly as brazen as it ordinarily is (though it easily outclasses Lady Gaga’s).

The only guest who holds her own here is the songwriter Hillary Lindsey, one of the most effective Nashville writers of the 2000s, and a master of the deeply felt king-size ballad. On “Million Reasons” (“Lord show me the way/to cut through all this worn out leather”), she tethers Gaga to something like a country ballad but can’t keep her there for long.

Even when Lady Gaga was at her pop peak, she wasn’t quite at its center — she was a loud outsider summiting pop music by force of will and shock of glam. As a result, her music can seem like an old memory, not a recent one. And pop moves quickly: Note her recent tiff with the club-pop dopes in the Chainsmokers, who said in an interview that they didn’t enjoy “Perfect Illusion.” She responded, coolly, on Twitter, in what felt like a mother dismissing an impudent child.

Which is fair: The Chainsmokers don’t see dance music as avant-garde theater or sociopolitical provocation. They see it as quick-stepping pop, which, though it’s fuzzy in the rearview, is also part of Lady Gaga’s legacy. That they were allergic to “Perfect Illusion” makes sense. But instead of taking offense and tossing off a tweet, she should maybe give them a call.