STELLA LEFTY ACCUSED OF COPYING A THIRD SONG

This has gone too far. This has gone too far. Stella Lefty is accused of copying a third song. And at this point, she's basically become the internet's punching bag for everything wrong with a nepo baby. But I think there are two separate conversations happening, and we need to separate them. First is the music. Boston has become a defining song in the summer. It's been sitting pretty at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. But almost immediately, people clocked that it sounds a lot like Noah Kahan's Stick Season. Now that she's officially credited as a songwriter on Boston, and it's crazy that this isn't Stella's biggest problem, but the PR surrounding it is just as bad, almost as the copying. Stella has said she wasn't thinking about Stick Season when she wrote Boston, which very well could be true. The problem is she's repeatedly covered Stick Season nearly 20 times across social media. So even if the influence was subconscious, it's pretty hard to argue that this wasn't somewhere in her musical vocabulary. Then Stella's debut album Long Way Home comes out and people very quickly point out that Summer You Were Mine is interpolating The Chicks' Grammy winning song There's Your Trouble. Her label says that the interpolation was in advance, but for whatever reason, the original songwriters were not included in the songwriting credits on streaming platforms. That was apparently a platform error. But now we're on three, now comparing Stella's song Why Wouldn't We to Blake Shelton's song I'll Name the Dogs. And when you put these two courses next to each other, it's an almost identical melody, but the songwriting follows the exact same structure. I'll leave this here. I'm talking you and me with the same street name. Same last name, same everything. It's a real thing, a how I feel thing. So I'ma go on and take a swing. You'll find the spot and I'll find the money. You'll be the pretty and I'll be the funny. I'll just leave this here. You'll plant the flowers, I'll plant the kisses. Baby, let's get right down to business. I'll hang the pictures, you'll hang the stars. You'll pick the paint, I'll pick a guitar. And as of right now, the songwriters of I'll Name the Dogs are not credited on this Stella song. But this is where the conversation's gone completely out of hand. Stella is the daughter of the billionaire co-founder of Groupon, and the internet has essentially turned her into the poster child of nepo baby problems. She's one 23-year-old artist and the amount of vitriol being thrown at her from the internet is completely out of hand. I don't think Stella is sitting in a room with co-writers deciding which country song I can rip off to make a few bucks. But I do think the criticism correctly points out a huge flaw in her sense of artistry, and that there doesn't really seem to be interpolation and sampling in songwriting aren't inherently bad. Artists have built incredible records around interpolating or sampling other songs because they bring their own fresh, unique perspective to the table. The problem is that there's nothing here that feels distinctly Stella. And that is where the billionaire's daughter becomes relevant, because privilege can get you access, you into the best songwriters, producers, label execs in the world, what it can't buy you is a point of view. There are plenty of successful artists with wealthy and significantly famous parents, but whatever advantages because of their upbringings, they eventually gave us to care and invest in them as artists. That has to be the path forward for Stella Lefty if she wants a career from here on out. Make sure you let me know what your thoughts are on all of this and follow for more music content.