Stella Lefty's debut album Long Way Home came out last Friday, and within days, fans had spotted something familiar in one of its songs. The track "Summer You Were Mine" draws heavily from "There's Your Trouble," the 1998 Grammy-winning song by the Chicks. But the original songwriters' names were missing from the credits, and the omission set off a wave of attention online.
The situation was resolved quickly. According to Rolling Stone, a representative for Lefty's label, Atlantic Records, confirmed on Friday that a streaming platform error had caused the names of "There's Your Trouble" songwriters Tia Sillers and Mark Selby to be dropped from the credits. Both names have since been restored. Reps for Spotify and Apple Music did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Rolling Stone reviewed materials showing that Lefty's team received proper clearance for the track from Sony Publishing in June, and that Sillers and Selby were listed in the song's internal label documents in late July, before the album was released. The omission appears to have been a technical error rather than an intentional oversight.
Sillers, who co-wrote the song with her husband Selby before his death in 2017, is not upset about how things unfolded. She has written other well-known country hits, including Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance" and "Blue on Black" for Kenny Wayne Shepherd. "We wrote a bang up, awesome song," she told Rolling Stone. "People are gonna fall in love with Stella's song, but then they're also gonna hopefully learn that it's an interpolation of 'There's Your Trouble,' and for a generation that might not know that song, they might go and discover that one too."
Interpolation, which involves reusing a melody or lyric with alterations rather than lifting a recording directly as a sample, has become a common tool in music production. Rolling Stone noted examples including Ariana Grande's "7 Rings," which transformed "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, and Taylor Swift's recent "Father Figure," which takes from the George Michael song of the same name.
Industry observers say the technique works because of the familiarity it creates. "A lot of A&Rs will break artists through an interpolation because it's so familiar," a music publishing source told Rolling Stone. "It's an easy way to get a new song out to a broad audience. People attach themselves to familiarity."
This is not the first time Lefty's music has been linked to an existing song. Her earlier track "Boston" drew comparisons to Noah Kahan's 2024 hit "Stick Season," and Kahan's team reached out before its release. Lefty, who is 24, added him as a co-songwriter. "When I was writing the song, I wasn't thinking about Noah Kahan," she said in a recent Vanity Fair article. "I was literally thinking about nothing at all … I don't want to step on anybody's toes, so I'm like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good."
Long Way Home is Lefty's first full-length release on Atlantic Records.
