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Originally Posted by bombaysaffires
I'm not talking about "inspired". Inspired is you sit at the piano and create your own work -- which seems more likely the case with Dreams.
These were cases where she completely wrote to someone else's track, which is totally fine, IF you give credit to the other person for their share i.e., writing the music. Otherwise, it's plagiarism.... ask Robin Thicke as well.
Just as Petty went after her that she couldn't use the chord sequences in his track for her song, Lindsey could have done the same for Wild Heart.
She also changed ONE word in Seven Wonders and demanded a share of the credit/royalties.
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Wasn't the issue with Runaway Trains that it was an instrumental sent to her by Mike Campbell (in their usual deal where he sent her instrumentals and she wrote lyrics over them and the studio changed it a bit, i.e. Freedom, Ghosts, Imperial Hotel, Kick It etc.) but Tom Petty was actually gonna use that one? I think that was kind of an accident and its why Fleetwood Mac immediately stopped working on Ooh My Love for Tango in the Night. If that's correct you can't really count that one unless you count all the other Campbell co-writes as unoriginal as well (which you could do, they're all kind of lazy sounding imo). The issue was that Stevie accidentally used an instrumental thinking that it was a Heartbreaker cast-off when it wasn't and then immediately complied.
They also didn't end up using that "Can't Go Back" instrumental or anything like it on the album version of "Wild Heart" anyway so I don't see how you could use that as evidence of her being unoriginal. Lindsey's track likely inspired her to write some lyrics, she then expanded on in a completely different track. If you use that as an example, you'd also have to make the case that the final version of "Ooh My Love" is unoriginal because some of the lyrics were originally written to the "Runaway Trains" instrumental, despite the fact that the final product sounds NOTHING like it. If you played me "Wild Heart" and "Can't Go Back" back-to-back and stated that Lindsey had a case for shutting it down or demanding credit I don't know how many would agree.
"Edge of Seventeen" and "Stand Back" both do have elements inspired by other artists, but I don't think they're apparent enough to credit those artists personally. Like you can sense the guitar riff on Edge in "Bring on the Night" but it has its own feel and its different enough that it stands out on its own. That kinda thing is standard practice in the music industry. You see it in movies too, the "Friday the 13th" series has a lot of the same elements as 1978's "Halloween" (killer POV shots, dumb sexed up teenagers getting killed, impenetrable serial killer, distinctive music when the killer is around, etc) but they changed enough elements in F13 that it stood on its own, for better or worse.
If Stevie had DIRECTLY sampled something in those tracks without giving credit (like Vanilla Ice did with "Ice Ice Baby" and "Under Pressure") or done something where you did make changes but they are so negligible that it evokes the same thing (Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" with "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" by The Rubinoos) then it would be bad, but she's not guilty of doing anything like those in her finished tracks.
HOWEVER, if there's one example of her plagiarizing FOR SURE, it's with "Illume". The music, structure, and progression is almost exactly the same as Richard Ashcroft's "New York", even putting aside the similar subject matter. The issue with that is whether that is more Stevie or Lindsey's blunder though. I'm willing to bet Lindsey since he probably did all the heavy-lifitng with the music and she likely just provided lyrics during the initial SYW sessions. I also can't imagine Stevie being in-tune with quirky artists in the early 2000's to even recognize Ashcroft's name let alone rip-off a relatively obscure song of his. Can't imagine her being much of a Verve fan
. The song "Say You Will" is also weirdly similar to Ashcroft's "C'Mon People", almost to the same level of blatancy.
I agree 150% on her writing credit for "Seven Wonders" being nonsense though
. Supposedly she changed the order of some verses too or something but come on Stevie, you only did that because you knew you weren't making anything off those other two Tango songs
. At least she didn't do Sandy dirty on "Too Far From Texas", besides ruining it with that vocal.
I agree that she hasn't had much pure originality since RAL era, with only brief bursts coming through amidst reworkings of old material. But that's been discussed 8,000,000 times already.