Stella Lefty’s new song “Summer You Were Mine” interpolates the Chicks‘ Grammy-winning song “There’s Your Trouble,” Rolling Stone has confirmed.
Fans had noticed similarities between the two songs after Lefty released her debut album Long Way Home last Friday but there was no reference to the 1998 song, for which the Chicks won the Grammy for Best Country Performance, on the new song’s listed credits.
The confusion was cleared up on Friday when a representative for Lefty’s label, Atlantic Records, told Rolling Stone that a streaming platform error had left off “There’s Your Trouble” original songwriters Tia Sillers and Mark Selby’s names. Both names now appear on the song’s credits. (Reps for Spotify and Apple Music did not immediately reply to requests for comment.)
Rolling Stone has reviewed materials that show Lefty’s team received proper clearance for the track from Sony Publishing in June, and that Sillers and Selby were noted on the track’s credits in internal label documents in late July before the album’s release.
Sillers — who has penned country music hits including Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” and “Blue on Black” for Kenny Wayne Shepherd — wrote the song with her husband Selby, who died in 2017. “We wrote a bang up, awesome song,” she tells Rolling Stone. “People are gonna fall in love with Stella’s song, but then they’re also gonna hopefully learn that it’s an interpolation of ‘There’s Your Trouble,’ and for a generation that might not know that song, they might go and discover that one too.”
Interpolation — which takes an existing melody or lyric and alters it, rather than sampling, which lifts directly from a song with no changes — has become more common practice in recent years. Think Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings,” which transformed The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things” to a beat-laden pop hit, or Taylor Swift’s recent “Father Figure” which takes inspiration from the George Michael song of the same name.
Similar to sampling, it’s a bankable way to hook a listener whose ear is already somewhat familiar to the melody. “A lot of A&Rs will break artists through an interpolation because it’s so familiar,” a music publishing source tells Rolling Stone. “It’s an easy way to get a new song out to a broad audience. People attach themselves to familiarity.”
Lefty’s breakout track “Boston” also had a familiar aspect that helped catch the attention of her now half-a-million followers after it drew comparisons to Noah Kahan’s 2024 hit “Stick Season.” In a recent Vanity Fair article, Lefty noted that she had no trouble naming him as a co-songwriter when his team got in touch prior to its official release.
“When I was writing the song, I wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan,” the 24-year-old said. “I was literally thinking about nothing at all … I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, so I’m like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good.”
