“It would be ludicrous. It’s a shared language of music”: Why Elvis Costello didn’t sue Olivia Rodrigo over Brutal guitar riff
When pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo released her debut album Sour in 2021, many listeners were struck by the similarities between the powerchord-driven guitar riff of its opener Brutal, and that of Elvis Costello’s 1978 hit Pump It Up.
But when he heard it, Costello wasn’t interested in pursuing any sort of legal action against Rodrigo, saying that it would have been “ludicrous”.
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Speaking to Vanity Fair, Costello reflects on his illustrious 50-plus-year career, and is asked how he feels about his first two albums – My Aim Is True (1977) and This Year’s Model (1978) – dominating his legacy when his time in music comes to an end.
“When my father died, he was the voice of a very famous lemonade commercial,” he remembers. “The headlines actually said, ‘Secret lemonade drinker dies.’ As if he’d never done anything else in a 50-year career. I don’t doubt a similar indignity will accompany my demise.
“But 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 songs which I’m known for.
“Some of them come from 1975. 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. So whether anybody else likes it or not, there are a few that I guess have joined that company.
He goes on: “I don’t, self-consciously, regard them that way, but it is a historical fact. The odd thing to say is, very few of my songs are performed by other people. By far the most successful and ubiquitous music to other performers that I’ve been involved in writing is The Juliet Letters… Not so many people are playing – other than maybe Pump It Up. And then mostly not playing it but alluding to it in their own arrangements. 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. But if there were no quotations, there’s be no Bach. There’d be no Mozart. There’d be no Sonny Rollins. So we can’t start worrying about that.”
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