Boy George and Lady Gaga are among the Songwriters Hall of Fame 2027 nominees announced Thursday, Nov. 5, on a performing songwriter ballot that also has Jack White, Shakira, Pink, Sia and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, the hall said. “Eligible voting members will have until midnight EST on December 14, 2026 to turn in ballots, with their choices of up to three nominees in each of the songwriter and performing songwriter categories,” the announcement said.
The non-performing list, one of two with 13 entries each, includes Stock Aitken Waterman, the British trio behind Kylie Minogue’s “I Should Be So Lucky,” and Boy Meets Girl, the duo of George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, who wrote Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).” “Once we had that chorus, it’s like everything came from that,” Rubicam said of the second hit in a 2025 MusicRadar interview. “Some songs you agonise over, but this was not one of them.”
Pete Bellotte, a co-writer of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and “Hot Stuff,” is back after he, Pink and Andreas Carlsson, a Swedish writer on the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” missed the final cut for the 2026 class, The Associated Press reported. Under the hall’s rules, a writer “qualifies for induction 20 years after their first commercial release of a song.”
Boy George Returns to the Songwriters Hall Ballot
Boy George, born George Alan O’Dowd, is one of several past nominees getting another chance this year, AP reported, and the hall’s list of his songs starts with “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” “I try to use real-life situations for pretty much everything I do,” he told Official Charts in 2018.
In the same interview, he said “there are artists out there who think they invented gay, but I’ve always wanted to live in a world where these things weren’t important.” Last year, he told Lulu’s “Turning Points” podcast that he’d turned into the “gay version” of his father, The Independent reported.
Lady Gaga Already Has a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award
The hall gave Gaga its first Contemporary Icon Award in 2015, and Tony Bennett handed it to her at that June’s gala in New York, AP reported. “It could be said that this honor was created with Lady Gaga in mind,” Linda Moran, the hall’s president and CEO, said when it announced the award.
“She is a consistent hit maker who has surprised everyone by proving to be as adept with the great standards as she is with her own songs,” Moran said.
Accepting the award, Gaga said, “I feel that I have a lot of work to do, as personally, I feel extremely unaccomplished as a songwriter,” IANS reported.
Gaga, who reportedly welcomed a daughter in June, is nominated this time with a song list that runs from “Poker Face” to “Born This Way” and “Die With a Smile.” “You know what? It’s not a lie that I am bisexual and I like women,” she said at her “Artpop” launch in Berlin in 2013, Gigwise reported.
When Songwriters Hall of Fame 2027 Nominees Learn Their Fate
The 2026 class, announced Jan. 21, went to Taylor Swift, Alanis Morissette, Kenny Loggins and Kiss’s Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, among others, Billboard reported. That class was inducted June 11 at the Marriott Marquis in New York, where Swift became the youngest woman ever inducted, AP reported.
The “2027 Induction & Awards Gala in New York City” named in the hall’s announcement doesn’t have a date yet, and AP reported that the new class will be named early next year.
