Before Ella Boh released a single song under her own name, she had co-written and sung background vocals on Selena Gomez’s “My Mind & Me,” become the first artist ever signed to Poems Publishing, and stacked a 40-song catalog written for other people. Her debut solo single, “a little bit,” did not arrive until March 7, 2025. The resume arrived years earlier. Almost nobody noticed, which was partly the point.
This is how the quietest kind of music career works: the songs get famous, the writer does not. Ella Boh spent the better part of a decade as one of dark pop’s invisible hitmakers before deciding the anonymity had run its course.
What did Ella Boh write for Selena Gomez?
The headline credit is “My Mind & Me” (November 2022). Apple Music’s official composition and performance credits list Ella Boh as both a songwriter and a background vocalist on the track, alongside Jon Bellion, Amy Allen, Michael Pollack, and Jordan K. and Stefan Johnson of The Monsters & Strangerz, the Grammy-winning duo who produced it. For a writer who was 21 when it came out, it is the kind of placement that usually makes a name. Hers stayed in the fine print.
That session circle mattered for a second reason. The Monsters & Strangerz are the same brothers who, with sibling Christian Johnson and Mega House Music’s David Silberstein and Jeremy Levin, went on to found Poems Publishing, a boutique publishing house based in Encino, California. When it came time to sign their first writer, they already knew exactly who could deliver.
The first name on the Poems roster
Billboard put it plainly: “Poems Publishing started with the signing of one emerging singer-songwriter, Ella Boh, two years ago.” She was not an early signing. She was the signing: the artist a Grammy-winning production team built a publishing company around before adding anyone else.
The roster that followed her tells you what shelf she sits on: Jack LaFrantz, a co-writer of Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” plus Isiah Tejada and Jackson Foote. Poems bet on Ella Boh first, then filled in around her.
What does a 40-song catalog sound like?
Her writer-producer output is compiled on an official Apple Music playlist called “Ella Boh: The Songwriters”: 40 songs, nearly two hours of music, spanning Max Styler, Rose Gray, Lillian Hepler, Jutes, Dixie, Freya Skye, Devon Gabriella, Zevia, Jai Wolf, Smith & Thell, Kailee Morgue and KiNG MALA, among others. The catalog reaches well past pop: she has a co-writing credit on electronic producer Ben Böhmer’s “Blossoms” (September 2024) and on the Deux Twins and Audrey Mika single “Madonna” (2022), and she worked as producer and background vocalist on Dixie’s “a letter to me.”
Then there is the deepest lane of all: she produces and creative-directs the records of dark-pop breakout Ari Abdul. Her Songwriters Hall of Fame bio states it directly: “Ella is locked in producing dark-pop breakout artist Ari Abdul, managing creative direction with the same intensity she brings to her own records.”
The industry sang her songs for years before anyone asked her to sing them.
The scholarship, then the spotlight
In April 2025, weeks after her debut single, the Songwriters Hall of Fame awarded her the 2025 Abe Olman Scholarship, selected by BMI, and summarized the arc in its citation: “Ella has quietly built a repertoire of collaborations with artists ranging from Selena Gomez to Ben Bohmer... As the writer and sole producer of her artist project, her music hits with emotional weight and cinematic edge.”
The writer years were never meant to be a destination. As she told Ones to Watch: “I started the music industry as an artist, but I was 15 years old. I would put covers on YouTube and ended up in sessions... When I met my publisher, they recognized I could write great pitch songs. I just couldn’t stop writing, so I just ended up writing for other people. Eventually, the songs started to sound like my songs.”
That last sentence is the whole pivot. Since March 2025 she has released at a pace almost nobody in her scene matches, put out two EPs of her own inside a year, and landed a support slot on Artemas’s 38-date world tour. The invisible hitmaker era is over. The catalog, meanwhile, keeps running quietly in the background, still earning, still growing, still mostly unnoticed by the people singing along.