The artist coined "Stella Thefty" has an "interpolation" problem
Country pop's laziest nepo baby Stella Lefty has once again ripped off a hit song — and not for the first time in her short, suspiciously quick-rising career.
Her blatant take on the melody of "Stick Season" in the No. 2 hit "Boston" has already been well documented, with songwriting credits for Noah Kahan retroactively added. Though she claims she was "literally thinking about nothing at all" while writing the song, Exclaim! staffers picked up on it on our first listen. (It's worth mentioning that Lefty has covered "Stick Season" multiple times on TikTok, so it's safe to say she's familiar.)
The saga continued when people online pointed out that another one of her tracks, "Summer You Were Mine," bears similarities to the Chicks' "There's Your Trouble." Once again, songwriting credits were retroactively given to the writers of the 1998 country radio hit.
Now, a third rip-off has entered the chat: Lefty's song "Why Wouldn't We" is now being compared to Blake Shelton's "I'll Name the Dogs." This time, the similarities are both melodic and lyrical, with both songs employing an "I've got this, you've got that" format. As of time of publication, the songwriters of "I'll Name the Dogs" have not been credited on "Why Wouldn't We."
For good measure, it's worth mentioning that "Why Wouldn't We" is also familiar fruit to Miley Cyrus's "The Climb" and that god-awful "God Made Girls" song from TikTok. So, perhaps we'll see those songwriting credits continue to grow longer than birth control warning pamphlets.
One might think it's unfair for Lefty to be catching so much heat, especially since interpolation is integral to the pop music landscape at this point. But, as the singer said herself, she's not thinking about much when writing her songs. Good interpolation has thought behind it, and elicits a better-faith interpretation than taking the formula of a hit song from the not-so-distant past and seeing if it still sticks.
Maybe it's true that the only reason people are paying attention to Lefty's supposed plagiarism is that it's easy to play the nepo baby card and get out of hater-jail free, but how much we care feeds the system that has made her famous to begin with. No publicity is bad publicity; I just expect people who have money to burn on their bad art to at least do something more interesting with it.
As it stands, it feels like Lefty is a psyop to make us all start buying Groupons again. As I've written before, maybe it's all just a ploy to stall her billionaire daddy from making her get a real job for another few years. Either way, at least we have something to complain about for the next week and a half — until the next person who arrives out of thin air does something to collectively piss us off.
