Breakout singer Stella Lefty has been dogged by criticism that her songs sound like existing hits. It’s a common situation in pop music, experts say — but rarely does it get this heated.
It started when fans saw that Noah Kahan had a songwriting credit on Lefty’s viral hit “Boston,” owing to its similarities to his own megahit “Stick Season.” The singer herself later confirmed that Kahan had been added to the credits after his team reached out to say they “think this sounds similar” to his song.
Then, listeners noticed that “Summer You Were Mine,” another song on her debut album Long Way Home, sounded a lot like “There’s Your Trouble,” a Grammy-winning 1998 hit by The Chicks. Her label, Atlantic Records, later clarified that the original songwriters, Tia Sillers and Mark Selby, had always been credited on Lefty’s song, but said their names had been left off Spotify and Apple due to “a streaming platform error.”
Another Stella track, “Why Wouldn’t We,” has drawn comparisons to Blake Shelton’s country hit “I’ll Name The Dogs.” Yet another, “Misery,” has now been linked to the song “A Million Dreams” from the musical film The Greatest Showman. No credits have been added to either of those songs. Representatives for Lefty declined to comment for this story.
Songs that sound similar are hardly a new phenomenon in the music industry. Ed Sheeran once noted there are “very few chords used in pop music” and that tens of thousands of songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Charlie Puth echoed that sentiment last year when Taylor Swift faced scrutiny over tracks on her The Life Of A Showgirl album, saying there are “bound to be similarities” to something that came before: “It’s almost never done maliciously.”
Such scenarios crop up routinely behind the scenes, multiple industry experts tell Billboard. Sometimes, an artist’s team will notice possible overlaps early in the process; other times, another artist or label will flag the issue, as appears to have happened with Kahan and Lefty. If the songs are close enough, the two sides can agree on a co-writing deal or an “interpolation” — a license to re-use existing written music in a new recording.
Even if common, similar sounds can easily turn into PR problems — as Lefty is quickly learning. Amid a meteoric rise, she’s also been tarred as “Stella Thefty” by many on social media, where videos comparing the songs have gone viral and claims of plagiarism proliferate. The songs do sound similar, especially “Boston” and “Stick Season,” and the singer did herself no favors with an interview in which she denied any connection to Kahan’s song, saying instead, “I was literally thinking about nothing at all.”
But according to Joe Bennett, a veteran forensic musicologist who helps stars analyze sound-alike tracks, such sonic overlap is pretty normal — and very rarely caused by outright theft. “Coincidental similarity between short bits of melody is way more common than people think it is,” says Bennett, a professor at Berklee College of Music. “And songwriters simply being out of ideas and plagiarizing each other is way less common than people think it is.”
Legally speaking, a similar sound only becomes a problem when a new song directly copies elements of an earlier song that are covered by copyright law. Those are big caveats: Songwriters can and often do accidentally write similar melodies; and songs can sound alike simply by virtue of sharing genre tropes that aren’t copyrightable in the first place.
That’s particularly true when it comes to pop and country, which Bennett says are “melodically the simplest forms of music,” where songs are almost always written in a 4/4 time signature and are often created by riffing on well-worn patterns. “Oh, and most songs are about love,” Bennett jokes. “So yeah, there are overlaps.”
Those overlaps are most often dealt with behind closed doors, but they’ve burst into public view numerous times over the past decade. In 2015, Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars added the five writers of the Gap Band‘s “Oops Up Side Your Head” to the songwriting credits of their supersmash “Uptown Funk.” In 2017, Sheeran added the writers of TLC‘s “No Scrubs” to the credits for his chart-topping “Shape of You.”
Sam Smith famously gave Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne each a 12.5% songwriting credit over similarities between his 2014 smash “Stay with Me” and Petty’s 1989 classic “I Won’t Back Down.” Petty acknowledged at the time it was likely just a “musical accident,” and Smith has maintained to this day that he had “never ever heard” the earlier song.
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Olivia Rodrigo added two credits to her chart-topping 2021 album SOUR — one for Paramore‘s Hayley Williams on “good 4 u” over similarities to “Misery Business,” and another for Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent over crossover between “déjà vu” and Swift’s “Cruel Summer.” Those credits kept the peace amid Rodrigo’s rise to fame, but they also likely cost her millions in royalties.
The reasons musicians cut such deals are multilayered, one expert says. Even if they never copied anything, litigation with another established star is something artists and labels are desperate to avoid, particularly in the decade since a lawsuit from Marvin Gaye’s family over Robin Thicke and Pharrell’s “Blurred Lines” ended in an ugly trial and a costly verdict.
And then there’s the court of public opinion. If two songs really do sound similar to the average listener, it’s sometimes easier to just share credit and move on rather than risk the appearance of plagiarism, even if they’d potentially still win in court. That’s especially true in the modern social media era, where everyone is an “expert,” the vibes are toxic, and it’s easy to overlay two songs in a DAW to create controversy on TikTok.
For Lefty, that controversy has reached her anyway. “Boston” remains at No. 2 on the Hot 100 and she’s selling out concert dates on her upcoming tour, but the backlash over the provenance of her music has taken on a life of its own. Last week, the Washington Post called the internet criticism of Lefty “some of the most intense online vitriol in recent memory.”
Part of it is no doubt driven by broader narratives about her family. The singer, born Stella Lefkofsky, is the daughter of Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky, who is worth an estimated $5.5 billion. In an era of rising income inequality, her privileged upbringing and sudden rise has sparked criticism that she is either a “nepo baby” or, perhaps even more dreaded in the music business, an “industry plant.”
It might also be the strange optics of the Kahan and Chicks credits. After Lefty told Vanity Fair that she “wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan” when she wrote the song, social media users promptly created montages of her covering “Stick Season” over and over and over again. And even if accidental, the initial omission of Sillers and Selby from the credits of “Summer You Were Mine” — two beloved Nashville songwriters — only added fuel to the fire.
When Puth discussed interpolations and accidental overlaps last year, he pleaded with music fans on social media that “we have to really stop demonizing this.” But when it comes to Lefty, some listeners aren’t exactly heeding that suggestion.
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Videos on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram comparing her songs to the earlier tracks have repeatedly gone viral. Headlines are gleefully tallying up the number of her songs facing plagiarism scrutiny. As recently as this week, new posts are now suggesting that a fifth song, her non-album single “seven eleven,” was copied from Wheatus’ 2000 classic “Teenage Dirtbag.”
The whole thing hit a fevered pitch last week, when Lefty was captured singing “Boston” to two young patients from St. Jude Children’s Hospital ahead of her debut at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Despite the setting, the comments quickly turned ugly: “Stella Thefty gets to play at THE Grand Ole Opry?” one asked. “I at least hope she thanks Noah Kahan during her set for ripping off his song.”
Things reached such a boil that other artists soon came to Lefty’s aid. In a pair of her own comments, country star Kelsea Ballerini said the St. Jude moment was “beautiful” and admonished the haters: “Y’all in the comments continue to not honor the people the actual Opry house opens its arms to.”
For Bennett, the musicologist, the intense backlash is just noise surrounding that same simple question: Did Lefty actually copy any original material from the older songs? And his verdict will surprise many of Lefty’s online critics.
After diving deep on the specific disputed songs, Bennett tells Billboard that each one has major differences from the earlier track, even including the “Boston”-“Stick Season” connection that seems so obvious to many listeners. The similarities that people are hearing in Lefty’s songs, Bennett says, are mostly just generic elements like chord progressions that have long existed in many earlier songs.
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That answer will hardly satisfy Lefty’s detractors, especially those who are more concerned about her family connections or that her songs are artistically derivative rather than outright stolen. And even if similarities crop up frequently in the music business, four of them on a single debut album is unusual.
But the dividing line between theft and similarity is important to keep straight, Bennett says — even if you don’t like the artist.
“Do we really want to live in a world where you can’t go from a G in bar one to a pushed A in bar two on a melodic fragment without paying Noah Kahan?” Bennett asks, using technical terms to describe his “philosophical” approach to such questions. “Do we want to live in a world where these small fragments are owned by someone and you can’t reuse them?”
