When Olivia Rodrigo's breakout album, SOUR, dropped in 2021, many music aficionados noticed the close similarity between Rodrigo's track Brutal, and Elvis Costello's 1978 hit, Pump It Up.
Both tracks are built around a punk-inspired chromatic guitar riff with a stomping groove – with the similarity being so uncanny that many netizens called Rodrigo and her team out for not properly crediting Costello.
Back then, Costello tweeted, “This is fine by me, Billy. It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That’s what I did.” He even pointed to Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry's Too Much Monkey Business as direct inspirations for his own track.
Now, three years later, Costello has addressed the controversy again, stating that, without references or “quotations, there’d be no Bach. There’d be no Mozart. There’d be no Sonny Rollins. So we can’t start worrying about that.”
“The truth of it is, if you wrote a song 50 years ago, which it almost is since I wrote the first drafts of Alison, and that’s still being played by anybody – well, think about what year it was when I started writing the songs which I’m known for. Some of them come from 1975,” he tells Vanity Fair.
“Trace back 50 years from that and tell me what songs were still being played [in the mid-'70s]. If they’re enduring, they’re regarded as standards.”
He goes on to say that few of his songs are actually performed by other people; rather, they're used as sources of inspiration for other artists' work.
“Like Olivia Rodrigo’s producer obviously did. Now, I did not find any reason to go after them legally for that, because I think it would be ludicrous. It’s a shared language of music. Other people clearly felt differently about other songs on that record.”
While Costello didn't demand a writing credit on the multi-platinum album, other artists and their teams seem to have done so.
Taylor Swift and her close collaborator Jack Antonoff are listed as co-writers of the songs 1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back and Deja Vu due to the similarities between those two tracks and Swift’s New Year's Day and Cruel Summer respectively.
Moreover, Paramore's Hayley Williams and Josh Farro were credited as co-writers for the mega-hit Good 4 U after widespread comparisons between the Rodrigo track and the band’s Misery Business took the internet by storm.
Speaking of inspirations, The Breeders' Kim Deal recently spoke about Rodrigo's love for the '90s alt-rock band, her obsession with loud guitars and her admiration for the female rock icons who came before her.
