Back in February, a little-known pop-country vocalist began teasing raw snippets of her new song, “Boston,” via TikTok. Over winsome piano chords, Stella Lefty crooned about beginning to fall for a crush, a faint drawl palpable in her husky enunciation of words like “nice.” Commenters gushed about the song in process, with some approvingly noting that it felt reminiscent of Noah Kahan’s 2022 hit “Stick Season.”
When Lefty officially released “Boston” in March, the song became an inescapable presence online. Not a month later, Wyatt Flores brought her out as a surprise guest at the Stagecoach Festival; the crowd screamed the refrain back at her. The song shot up the Billboard Hot 100, eventually climbing to No. 2, shortly afterward. By June, Lefty — born Lefkofsky — had been minted as a fast-rising new voice in country music with her performance at Nashville’s CMA Fest.
Shortly after her performance at Lollapalooza, Lefty addressed the alleged parallels between “Boston” and “Stick Season” in a Vanity Fair interview, explaining that someone in Kahan’s camp had reached out: “We think this sounds similar,” she recalls their telling her. Lefty opted to give Kahan a songwriting credit before the song’s release, but added that while writing “Boston,” she “wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan. I was literally thinking about nothing at all.”
At first blush, Lefty’s viral ascent smacked of a throwback promise of the early internet: a place where an unknown talent could post a song that they’d cobbled together in a mere 15 minutes in their bedroom, and hit it big overnight. But after Lefty, 24, downplayed the comparisons between her song and Kahan’s — and when it became widely known that she is the daughter of Eric Lefkofsky, the billionaire co-founder of Groupon and now chief executive of an A.I. tech company — the internet rallied against her.
Posts have exhumed videos of Lefty covering “Stick Season” in an effort to undermine her claim that she never consciously ripped off Kahan. Her many critics have dubbed her “Stella Thefty,” and others have accused her of being an “industry plant” and a “nepo baby.” Dozens of song breakdown videos cropping up on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, offered granular explanations, sometimes through musical notations, to claim that she’d copied a host of other songs. Since the “Boston” controversy, internet posters have used these step-by-step videos, with mash-ups, to accuse Lefty of copying at least a half-dozen other songs, including the work of the Chicks and Wheatus, in her tracks “Summer You Were Mine” and “Seven Eleven,” respectively. (The original songwriters of the Chicks’ “There’s Your Trouble,” Tia Sillers and Mark Selby, have since been credited as co-writers to “Summer You Were Mine.” A rep for Lefty at Atlantic told Rolling Stone that their names had initially been left off the “Summer You Were Mine” songwriting credits in a “streaming platform error” but were then amended to include them.)
Although these video breakdown essays aren’t always accurate, they have fueled criticism that Lefty’s songwriting has borrowed from others. Lefty’s public relations representatives, responding to a request for comment, said she was not available.
The controversy has become ubiquitous enough that a “Saturday Night Live” sketch (cut from the show for time) spoofed her as a chronic copycat. (Lefty commented in response, “I’m so dead.”) Whether Lefty actually infringed on anyone’s copyright has become almost beside the point: Hating on Lefty’s songs is its own social media phenomenon.
The underlying question of whether Lefty swiped other people’s music is tricky and open to interpretation. Nate Sloan, a forensic musicologist who teaches at the University of Southern California and is a co-host of the podcast “Switched on Pop,” said that while “Stick Season” and “Boston” may sound similar, they are “not identical from a musicological perspective.” Humans are hard-wired to seek out patterns, so that when we hear a melodic contour — or what Sloan called the “shape” of a musical line — that reminds us of something else, our minds tend to fill in the rest.
Sloan noted that while the rhythm, notes and melodic contour of Lefty’s lyrics in lines such as “jumping the gun,” which has been accused of lifting Kahan’s phrasing “season of the sticks,” are not a perfect match, “there’s enough similarity, and that kind of phrasing is distinctive enough that our brains latch onto it.”
Yet most people are prone to pattern recognition, Brian McBrearty, a forensic musicologist who founded Musicologize, a company focused on copyright issues, said, that “leads people to see cause and effect and attribute to copying what might otherwise be more readily be attributable to coincidence.”
The standard of proof is higher in court. A legal claim typically must demonstrate that the plaintiff is the owner of a valid copyright, that there is substantial similarity between works and access to the copyrighted material to make a case for infringement, said Jacqueline Charlesworth, a partner at Bayla Law Group and a former general counsel at the U.S. Copyright Office. A 2018 ruling that found Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams guilty of infringing on Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” for their 2013 smash “Blurred Lines” hinged, in part, on a GQ interview where Thicke said he told Williams in the studio that “Got to Give It Up” was one of his favorite songs — “damn, we should make something like that, something with that groove.” Had Lefty not given Kahan a songwriting credit for “Boston,” videos of her covering “Stick Season” in the past might have been similarly used in court to demonstrate access. But the hard question of whether the works were substantially similar would remain.
The sheer volume of music online has also created a higher “probability that things like this will be discovered, just because there’s more avenues to discover it and broadcast it” on the internet, Charlesworth added.
While Lefty has been targeted for at least a half-dozen other potential song similarities, Sloan said, the accusations are “pretty weak from a musicological perspective.”
Then again, he added, Lefty is far from the first artist to be accused of interpolating another musician’s song. Olivia Rodrigo, for example, added songwriting credits for Taylor Swift and members of Paramore to her “Sour” album after its release; Beyoncé removed an interpolation of Kelis’s “Milkshake” from “Renaissance” post-release after Kelis criticized its use. But Lefty’s sudden rise, her family wealth and the high engagement on posts attacking her may all make her an easy target. “I’m not here to defend a billionaire’s daughter,” Sloan said. “But your fave, to use internet slang, does this too.”
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