Hayley Williams gets songwriting credit on Olivia Rodrigo's 'Good 4 U' after 'Misery Business' comparisons
25 August 2021, 17:46
Olivia Rodrigo BTS of the Good 4 U video
Good For Hayley!
Paramore's Hayley Williams and ex-guitarist Josh Farro are now listed as co-writers for Olivia Rodrigo's 'Good 4 U'.
According to the BBC, the update to the songwriting credits were first revealed by Paramore's publishers, Warner Chappell Music, who celebrated 'Good 4 U' reaching number one in the US with a Instagram Stories post saying: "huge shoutout to our writers Hayley Williams and Joshua Farro".
'Good 4 U' spent 5 weeks at no.1 in the UK and it also hit the top spot in America too. Sour, Olivia's debut album from which the single is taken, is one of the biggest selling albums of 2021 around the world, which means that the royalty payments owed to Williams and Farro are likely to be, to use the correct financial lingo, fucking massive.
Hayley Williams commented on the news on her Instagram Stories, commenting "our publisher is wildin rn" when Warner Chappell Music first posted about Hayley and Josh being listed as songwriters.
READ MORE: Olivia Rodrigo "resents" the narrative about her and Sabrina Carpenter following Drivers License
Did Hayley Williams and Josh Farro write 'Good For U'?
Not long after 'Good 4 U' was published, fans and critics were quick to comment on the similarities between Paramore's 2007 single 'Misery Business' and 'Good 4 U'. While we don't know for sure, this does look like another case of songwriting credits being given retroactively to another songwriter after similarities between the two songs were noticed.
This is a fairly standard practice in the music industry. In fact, this is not Olivia's first brush with retroactive songwriting credits disputes.
Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff were given a songwriting credit on 'Step Forward, 3 Steps Back 'due to its interpolation of melodies from Taylor's New Year's Day from her album Reputation.
And as Pitchfork noted, Annie Clark, Jack Antonoff, and Taylor Swift were also retroactively credited as writers of Sour’s 'Deja Vu'. The credit came after Olivia admitted that the bridge for her song was inspired by Swift’s 'Cruel Summer'.
Olivia Rodrigo, Paramore - good 4 ur misery business (Mashup)
Olivia was also accused of lifting a guitar riff from Elvis Costello's 1978 hit 'Pump It Up' for her song 'Brutal' but, in a surprise response, Costello defended Olivia on his Twitter, saying "It's how rock & roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That's what I did."
Then there have been several accusations of plagiarism against Olivia's choice of visuals. Courtney Love recently went on a rant about one of Olivia's artworks being similar to the artwork from on Hole's Live Through This. Earlier this week, fans spotted several similarities between Olivia's video for 'Brutal' and Rina Sawayama's 'XS'. Fans of Pom Pom Squad have previously noticed that Olivia has used a similar aesthetic to the indie rock band.
