Are y'all up on Stella Lefty? The Chicago pop-country artist/Groupon heiress born Stella Lefkofsky? When I heard her song "Boston" on the radio I was like, wait, are people already recording Noah Kahan covers, or has his melodic phrasing just become extremely influential? It turns out that "Boston" liberally interpolates "Stick Season," Kahan's signature hit (though not on purpose, as we'll see).
The song appeared on Lefty's Is This Heaven? EP earlier this year and was a breakout TikTok hit, climbing all the way to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Now, in the wake of her debut album Long Way Home's release last Friday, Lefty has been profiled by Vanity Fair, perhaps the publication most likely to be sympathetic to recording artists awaiting a billion-dollar inheritance who dipped into country music less than a year ago and got famous by simply borrowing the chorus from an existing hit.
Indeed, VF says she technically doesn't qualify as a nepo baby! Elsewhere in the piece, Lefty says the Kahan interpolation was unintentional: "When I was writing the song, I wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan. I was literally thinking about nothing at all." However, between the song's TikTok breakout and its official release, Kahan's team got in touch to say they noticed a resemblance, so she granted him a retroactive writing credit. "I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes," she says, "so I’m like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good."
It does sound like that! A lot like that!
