Lady Gaga opens up about the songs that have marked her personal and creative journey — from Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” to Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” Each track tells a story, each melody mirrors a moment, and together they reveal the soundtrack of a woman who turned pop into art and emotion into energy

When Lady Gaga talks about music, she doesn’t sound like a superstar analysing her hits — she sounds like someone reliving snapshots of her own soul. In a recent conversation tied to the Rolling Stone series My Life in 10 Songs, the artist peeled back the layers of her career to share the tracks that formed her identity long before the world met the larger-than-life persona she’s known for today.

The journey starts with a piano and a memory: her father playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” in their living room. For Gaga, that song isn’t just classic rock; it’s a time capsule. She remembers the warmth of her family, the smell of Sunday mornings, and the feeling of discovering what passion sounds like. She calls it a hymn to nostalgia — a lesson in letting go and moving forward. It’s no surprise that the emotional grit of Springsteen later echoed through her own anthems, especially when she wrote Born This Way.

As she puts it, The Fame was the dream version of herself — the fantasy of fame and fashion — while Born This Way was the reflection, a mirror held up to the pieces of her past. The contrast between those albums is pure Lady Gaga: one side neon and glitter, the other raw and real.

Her list moves on to Beck’s “Nicotine & Gravy”, a song that takes her back to the Lower East Side in New York, long before the wigs, meat dresses and stadium lights. Back then, Gaga was just Stefani Germanotta — a young artist chasing identity through sound and late-night performances. Beck’s playful weirdness, his mix of funk and irony, gave her permission to experiment. “It made me want to change,” she’s said. “To reinvent myself again and again.” That restless energy became her signature; every era, from Artpop to Chromatica, reinvention runs like electricity through her work.

But one track in particular became a turning point: “I Was Born This Way” by Carl Bean. Long before it morphed into her 2011 anthem of empowerment, the original song was already a declaration of self-acceptance. When Gaga heard it, she says she felt recognised — as if someone had written her feelings decades before she could express them. That emotional connection became the foundation for one of pop’s most defining statements about identity and pride.

Her musical influences don’t stop at disco or pop. Gaga’s taste is gloriously eclectic, dipping into psychedelic rock, jazz, and soul. She cites Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” and David Bowie’s “Watch That Man” among her touchstones — tracks that introduced her to the theatrical side of sound. Bowie, especially, remains her eternal muse: not for his fame, but for his fearless storytelling. She once said that he “made the idea of being misunderstood feel like home.”

From the smoky clubs of 1970s London to the bold beats of 2000s dance floors, Gaga has always built bridges between eras. Her choices prove she’s a listener before she’s a performer — someone who absorbs the vibrations of each decade and filters them through her own eccentric lens.

Among the softer moments in her playlist are Carole King’s Tapestry and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” The first reminds her of simplicity and warmth; the second, of rhythm and energy. “Carole is like a warm hug,” she admits — the kind of music that feels like sunlight through a window. Stevie, on the other hand, brings out her creative spark. She even channelled some of that soulful groove while working on Mayhem, her most recent record. You can hear the echoes of Wonder’s funk in her latest experiments with sound — a fusion of vintage soul and futuristic beats that only Gaga could imagine.

She doesn’t stop there. Reaching back to the 1950s, she highlights Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” and Miles Davis’s “So What.” These songs taught her the power of pause — how silence, timing, and restraint can make emotion hit harder than volume ever could. For someone often celebrated for excess, Gaga’s respect for quiet is telling. Behind the glitter and theatrics lies a musician obsessed with nuance.

Then come the rock gods. The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You” shaped her understanding of drama — not just in music, but in performance. “Behind every rock god,” she says, “there’s a human being with sensitivity.” It’s a lesson she’s embodied on stage: blending boldness with vulnerability, spectacle with sincerity.

Gaga’s timeline of inspiration stretches into the modern era too. Songs like “Tear You Apart” by She Wants Revenge, “Never Enough” by The Cure, and “Stress” by Justice belong to her late-night playlists — the ones that feed her imagination when the world sleeps. She laughs that her list of ten songs is more like fifteen, but who’s counting? For her, music is endless.

Through it all, one message keeps resurfacing: Lady Gaga sees music not as a product, but as a mirror. Every lyric, every chord, every memory becomes a reflection of who she was at that moment. Her story isn’t a straight line from small clubs to global fame — it’s a mosaic of sound, heartbreak, discovery, and play. That’s why fans don’t just listen to her; they live through her songs.

Lady Gaga’s evolution proves that pop can be profound, and nostalgia can be revolutionary. The songs that shaped her life also shaped an entire generation that learned to love louder, dream bigger, and dance through every heartbreak. And as she says with a smile, she could go on forever — because for Lady Gaga, the music never really stops.