Robbie Williams Defends Olivia Rodrigo Over Claims ‘Take Me Home’ Sounds Like His Hit: ‘I Couldn’t Care Less’

Robbie Williams says he won’t sue Olivia Rodrigo after fans claimed her holiday song “Take Me Home (4 Christmas)” sounds like his 2012 hit “Candy.” He called such lawsuits “disgusting” and “complete bollocks.”

In an Instagram post on Monday (Nov. 9), Williams defended the “Good 4 U” singer and called her “f–king brilliant.” Social media users had speculated that Rodrigo’s Christmas song, released Nov. 5, copied “Candy.”

“It sounds to me as though she may have accidentally stumbled across a musical echo of mine in one of her new songs. And do you know what? I couldn’t care less,” Williams said. “I’m not going after her. Because I think at some point, some f–king sanity has to prevail.”

The British singer also criticized the rush to accuse pop artists of copying earlier songs, writing that there are “only so many notes” and that artists “all stand on the shoulders of people who came before us.”

“Artists deserve to be protected. But there’s a difference between protecting your work and treating every vaguely familiar sequence of notes as a winning lottery ticket,” Williams said. “Some of this stuff has become ambulance chasing. And I think it’s disgusting.”

Other pop stars have made similar arguments. Ed Sheeran, who has faced several high-profile lawsuits, once noted that there are “very few chords used in pop music.” Charlie Puth defended Taylor Swift when her album The Life of a Showgirl faced scrutiny, saying on TikTok that there are “bound to be similarities” to something that came before.

“Coincidental similarity between short bits of melody is way more common than people think it is,” veteran forensic musicologist Joe Bennett told Billboard in September. “And songwriters simply being out of ideas and plagiarizing each other is way less common than people think it is.”

The attention to Rodrigo’s song may be driven by earlier copying allegations involving her 2021 breakout album Sour. In July 2021, she retroactively added Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent as songwriters on “Deja Vu” over similarities to “Cruel Summer” from Swift’s Lover album. Months later, Rodrigo gave Paramore’s Hayley Williams a similar credit on “Good 4 U” after fans heard similarities to the pop-punk band’s “Misery Business.”

Fans also claimed Rodrigo’s “Brutal” sounded like Elvis Costello’s 1978 hit “Pump It Up.” Costello later told a fan on X, “This is fine by me … It’s how rock and roll works.”

Stella Lefty has faced similar criticism this year. She added a songwriting credit for Noah Kahan on her viral hit “Boston” after his team contacted her to say they “think this sounds similar” to his hit “Stick Season.”

Similarity becomes infringement when a song directly copies elements of an existing song protected by copyright law. Experts say that happens far less often than fans think, and that many pop songs overlap by coincidence because they share basic chord progressions or unprotected genre conventions.

Williams’ post had received more than 64,000 likes by mid-Monday morning, including one from Lefty.

“Music has been around for a very long time. We’re all going to bump into each other eventually,” Williams added. “That’s how music works. If we keep punishing people for accidentally arriving somewhere somebody else has already been, eventually we’re going to frighten the creativity out of everyone.”

See his full message below:

Source: Billboard