In May 2026, an unusual thing happened. A single by an artist that few had yet heard of in Nashville debuted on the Billboard Country Airplay chart. The singer was named Stella Lefty and the song was titled “Boston,” which, for a genre that doesn’t have many songs about Northern cities, was already a unique occurrence. It was also by a woman, another anomaly in the heavily male-skewed world of country radio.
What wasn’t unusual, however, was that “Boston” sounded familiar: It held enough melodic similarity to Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” that the Vermont songwriter’s name was added to the writing credits. (In a Vanity Fair interview, Lefty said she added Kahan as a cowriter when his team reached out before the song’s official release.) Even so, on Music Row, familiarity works, and no one batted an eye.
“Country music,” as RJ Curtis, executive director of Country Radio Broadcasters Inc., puts it, “has always borrowed from itself.”
Lefty kept rising. “Boston” flew up the charts and currently sits at Number Three on Country Airplay and Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100. By the time Nashville’s mecca of country music, CMA Fest, rolled around in June, Lefty was playing to a capacity crowd, and her tour dates started selling out one after another. Though a vocal part of the internet was lobbing allegations at Lefty of being a “nepo baby” or an “industry plant” because she is the daughter of Groupon founder and billionaire Eric Lefkofsky, the audience at her shows told a much different story. Young girls sang every word, and country fans hounded her to sign their “Lefty” hats, which she did diligently. For all the anger online, the people who went to see her sing live seemed to be having a pretty good time.
Two months later, a lot has changed. Lefty has been accused of multiple instances of plagiarism, with “Stella Thefty” memes popping up all over the internet. Beyond “Boston” and Kahan, music fans noticed a similarity between her song “Summer You Were Mine,” from Lefty’s debut LP, Long Way Home, and the Chicks’ 1998 hit “There’s Your Trouble.” According to a representative for Atlantic Records, Lefty’s label, a streaming platform mistakenly left off the names of Tia Sillers and Mark Selby, the songwriters behind “There’s Your Trouble.” (Both appear in the credits for “Summer You Were Mine.”)
Then, as Rolling Stone detailed, there was a series of other claims. Her 2025 track “Why Wouldn’t We” apparently mirrors Blake Shelton’s 2017 song “I’ll Name the Dogs,” while her song “Seven Eleven” sounds similar to Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag.” Most recently, “Misery,” from Lefty’s Tragic, Really EP, is being compared to “A Million Dreams,” from the 2017 musical movie The Greatest Showman. Perhaps the most outlandish comparison is one asserting that “Summer You Were Mine” sounds like the theme song to Full House, a show that aired before Lefty was born. None of the writers of those songs have been credited or addressed by Lefty’s team thus far, nor is it clear if they need to be. (A rep for Lefty did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.)
Further accusations have ranged from reasonable to the irrational, with some claiming that Lefty is part of an AI experiment launched by her father — who runs a healthcare company that leverages AI to help cure cancer, which he started after his wife, and Lefty’s mother, was diagnosed with the disease. When Lefty performed at the Grand Ole Opry last month, some seized the opportunity to complain about Lefty’s appearance at the country institution in the comments of a video of her singing for kids in active treatment at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. There’s also been online chatter leaning toward the antisemitic (Lefty is Jewish), and other comments painting her as a thieving mastermind knowingly ripping off songs.
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In Nashville, though, many are shaking their heads. While few would argue that an artist should use another’s material without credit, some industry insiders think that the degree of vitriol being directed at Lefty is unfounded — especially since country radio, and Top 40 as well, is often dominated by songs that sound very much alike. So much alike, that a YouTube account called Sir Mashalot once put together a mashup of six country songs, from male artists like Blake Shelton, Luke Bryan, and Cole Swindell, that all flowed into one another so seamlessly that it was nearly impossible to discern them.
Bro-country, the prevailing country trend of the 2010s, was defined by songs that were interchangeable, using the familiar signifiers of trucks, tailgates, and ladies in jean shorts, usually set to the same midtempo beat. And by 2023, rewriting old songs had become its own trend among country’s male contingent as “interpolation songs” dominated the charts. Swindell’s “She Had Me at Heads Carolina” re-created a portion of Jo Dee Messina’s 1996 hit “Heads Carolina, Tails California” — and won Song of the Year at the ACM Awards. Jake Owen redid Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” to “On the Boat Again.” Dustin Lynch and Jelly Roll turned Dobie Gray’s 1973 hit “Drift Away” into “Chevrolet.” To be clear, these songs all credited the original writers, but they also lifted entire melodies and sonic patterns, with the artists transparently co-opting the familiarity of the source material songs to try to score easy airwaves success. But even without direct interpretations, country music has always borrowed, with male artists allowed to succeed under this model with little scrutiny.
“Let’s be honest, that’s been going on for years in this town,” Curtis says. “How many sounds and artists has Nashville begun mass producing once the original becomes popular?” Curtis points to the way new artists and songwriters come of age, “with access to an almost limitless musical universe,” he says. “Country. Rock. Pop. Hip-hop. R&B. Americana. Indie. EDM. Music from generations before them and music released halfway around the world yesterday. So when someone in a writing room says, ‘I want something that feels like that,’ ‘that’ could be almost anything.”
When you mature as an artist covering songs on TikTok — as Lefty has — that becomes even more prominent. The inspiration base isn’t a set of five or six CDs that an artist played while growing up, but rather an infinite scroll of melodies that come through their phone in 30-second blasts.
That applies to listeners too. Curtis points out that fans having limitless music available to stream makes them their own amateur musicologists. “We’ve probably never had more listeners capable of instantly recognising, and pointing out, where they think they’ve heard something before,” he says. “There’s still a fine line between influence and copying. There always has been.”
Ed Sheeran, who went to court in 2024 on claims that his hit “Thinking Out Loud” copied from Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” once explained it this way: “There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify.” Sheeran ended up winning his case.
Nashville has come to Lefty’s defence more often than not. Kelsea Ballerini backed her up, and so has Luke Combs’ manager, Chris Kappy. Lefty played a number of shows at CMA Fest, and on Monday was announced as one of the performers at Stagecoach 2027, with her name on the same line of the poster as Shaboozey and outlaw-country songwriter Cody Jinks. She also continues to stream globally: According to data from Luminate, Lefty is averaging around 30 million on-demand weekly U.S. streams.
Leslie Fram, a country-music executive who leads the artist-development company FemCo, finds the “intensity” of the backlash to be out of proportion. “Country and pop country have always worked with a fairly limited palette of chords and melodies. Similar progressions, familiar hooks, and shared lyrical DNA show up across decades of hits,” Fram says. “Plenty of songs have echoed older ones without anyone rushing to file claims. Sometimes it’s pure coincidence. Other times an artist absorbs something they’ve played or covered so many times that it surfaces without them even realising it. When a clear similarity is noticed, the professional path is straightforward: clear the interpolation and give the proper credits. That’s exactly what happened with the Chicks and Noah Kahan references.”
To her credit, Lefty did act swiftly to rectify the publishing credits when it came to “Boston” and “Summer You Were Mine,” but comments she made to Vanity Fair in which she claimed to not be thinking about Kahan while writing didn’t do her any favours. Dr. Jada Watson, a musicologist, does see some similarities in the other songs Lefty is accused of copying, but says that once a pattern is established, it’s easy to start questioning a writer’s practice.
“One accusation of this nature leads to fishing expeditions,” Watson says. “Unfortunately, the similarities are there to find. There are legitimate reasons for scrutiny in each of these cases. But misogyny can shape the intensity and character of that scrutiny: women, especially young women, are more likely to become the subject of the kind of listening expedition where finding the next similarity becomes a game.”
Watson thinks the conversation should not just be about Lefty’s practice, but also about the larger issues at play. Namely, who gets to inherit traditions in country music. “Lefty makes several forms of inheritance unusually visible at once: extraordinary financial resources, access to the institutional machinery that can protect and sustain a career, entry into a genre whose ideas of authenticity and belonging have historically been shaped by race, gender, and class, and, quite literally, access to the music that came before her,” she says. “The point isn’t that any one of those things makes her undeserving. It’s that not everyone gets to inherit — or to make use of what they inherit — on equal terms.”
Fram warns against dismissing an artist’s career because of song soundalikes. “Throwing out an entire catalogue because a few tracks share DNA with older records treats familiarity as a fatal flaw. Follow that logic far enough and a huge amount of popular music disappears,” she says, chalking up much of the vitriol directed at Lefty to “class resentment.”
To be sure, having a billionaire father in an age where financial inequality is more stark than ever opens Lefty’s career up to scrutiny. And her family’s extreme wealth should make it easy for her to navigate any number of legal complications that may come, while also affording her the luxury to make music without day-to-day worries. What it doesn’t mean, though, is that Lefty is able to buy fans. Money isn’t putting people in concert seats; the songs are. (As manager and music publisher Tracy Gershon puts it, “Good is good.”) But because the fans in those seats are primarily young women, it’s often easy for the public to dismiss their taste in an artist as invalid.
“I manage artists,” Comb’s manager Kappy wrote on Instagram. “I have become very successful and have money. Success isn’t based on money, or every act I manage would be in arenas and stadiums because I would just buy it. That’s the problem with all of your arguments and stupid comments. Yes, they are stupid, you need to hear the truth. No amount of money buys success, it’s the music.”
Curtis, however, is deflated that all of this talk around Lefty’s alleged song-poaching is taking away from what he sees as a defining highlight of 2026. “Isn’t it disappointing that this Stella blowback is even a story, in the midst of a historic year for female artists in country music, and a week where females dominated the CMA nominations?” he says. “For me, that is the real story.”
From Rolling Stone US
