When Lindsey Buckingham committed accidental plagiarism
Plagiarism is a scourge in the world of pop music. The deliberate and calculated efforts to make modern songs all sound the same are usually reserved for the darkest corners of the music industry, as record executives use algorithms and computers to determine the tracks least likely to offend and most likely to get stuck in your head. Even before the 21st century, deliberately taking riffs and basslines without proper credit was frowned upon, if not an entirely frequent occurrence. However, for Lindsey Buckingham, it was an entirely accidental happening.
As one of the pivotal members of Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham has been rightly heralded as one of the foremost rock guitarists of his generation. A powerhouse performer, built out of classic rock and blues with a definitive punk edge, Buckingham would transform the style of Fleetwood Mac when he and his then-partner Stevie Nicks joined the group in 1975.
Of course, we don’t have the time or space to be able to regale you with everything that happened in that band, but it provided Buckingham with a sincere reputation for songwriting. The group would reunite and disband from time to time, but Buckingham found himself out of the band permanently when it’s alleged Stevie Nicks set the rest of the group an ultimatum in 2018. Instead of trying to fight the decision, the guitarist decided to go out on his own to create his seventh solo project in 2021; he did so with a clear conscience and a need to express himself away from the fractious band.
His self-titled solo record would receive more press than usual and suggested to many of his fans that he was back in the groove of making music. He had rekindled the spark he needed to write rock songs once more and set about writing a pair of tunes to adorn his new record. ‘Power Down’ and ‘Swan Song’ can be regarded as a double act on the record.
As Buckingham told Uncut: “I wanted to do two songs that felt like a pair. Those two were done with the same mindset, built for a drum loop, built off the same idea of a background vocal, and suddenly, subject-wise built off of a certain idea of relationship challenges. So yeah, it all grew out of loops. I sensed right away that because I was making something that was a little more poppy than I’d done in a while, that these would be, in a way, the counterpoints to that poppiness.”
The latter of the tracks, ‘Swan Song’ was created from a demo Buckingham had rediscovered 20 years after it was first recorded. He took the basis of the song and embellished it with modern sounds, including a boundary-pushing electronic glitch. However, later that year, things turned sour when it became clear that Buckingham had accidentally plagiarised another artist’s song.
Blinker The Star’s Jordon Zadorozny and Medicine’s Brad Laner contacted Buckingham when Zadorozny noticed that the track sounded remarkably similar to the pair’s ‘Mind’s Eye’, which they had written together two decades prior. The lyrics were also incredibly similar. On ‘Mind’s Eye’, the chorus is: “It isn’t right to keep me waiting/ Do you have to hold out on me so long now?/ Is it right to keep me waiting?/ In the shadow of our mind’s eye.”
‘Swan Song’, on the other hand, goes: “But is it right to keep me waiting?/ Is it right to make me hold out so long?/ Yeah, is it right to keep me waiting/ In the shadow of our swan song.” Zadorozny and Buckingham had been paired together when the former had been allowed to pick his dream producer to work with by Dreamworks, he told Spin: “It’s something I used to think about as a high school kid going to bed at night. It was pure fantasy. ‘Out of all my heroes, who could I work with?’ And then it was, ‘Wow, this is actually happening.'”
Perhaps owing to this hero worship, Zadorozny assumed that the plagiarism was a mistake: “He’s got years of integrity and no reason to be stealing songs from anyone, especially us. He’d taken our song, made a demo himself of it, put it away for a rainy day and, as it turns out, 16 or 17 years later found that demo and thought, ‘This is a cool thing I did back in 2000.'”
It’s not the first time that a song has been unintentionally plagiarised, with George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ the most famous case of all. However, Buckingham’s team were quick to release a statement on the event: “Following the recent release of Lindsey’s self-titled album, it was brought to his attention that significant elements of the song ‘Swan Song,’ had come from a song that had been shared with him more than 20 years ago while he was working in a Los Angeles studio, producing some music for Brad Laner and Jordon Zadorozny.
“When this unintentional and inadvertent usage was raised to Lindsey, he quickly realised his mistake, and a friendly resolution was made by all parties.” Flat sums and publishing rights were paid out, and the duo are now given co-credits on the song meaning all is well that ends well.
You can listen to Lindsey Buckingham’s ‘Swan Song’
