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Brit Award winner Olivia Dean has been accused of copying Bill Withers’ hit “Just The Two of Us” in a new US lawsuit.
Mattie Music Group, which owns the rights to Withers’ back catalogue, filed a lawsuit against Capitol Records claiming that Dean and her fellow songwriters copied the track “in large and significant part” when creating her song “I’ve Seen It”.
Dean wrote the song with Bastian Langebæk and Max Wolfgang, releasing it as the final track on her second studio album, The Art of Loving, last September. The album topped the music charts in the UK, Australia, Germany and other countries, and went on to win Album of the Year at the Brit Awards and MOBO Awards earlier this year.
In the lawsuit, filed with the US District Court in the Central District of California on Thursday (1 October), Mattie Music Group claimed that it hired a mixologist to perform musicological analysis on “I’ve Seen It” and found that it contained “substantial similarities in protectable musical expression” with the Withers song.
The claimants also alleged in the documents, seen by The Independent, that the songs “share musical features” that are “so striking” that their similarities could not have been a coincidence. They claim that they sent written notice to the defendants in August this year, notifying them of the “material musical similarities”, but the record continued to be distributed.
They are asking for an injunction “permanently restraining” the music label from further infringing their copyrights, as well as damages.
The Independent has contacted Dean and Universal Music Group, which owns Capitol Records, for comment.
“Just the Two of Us” was released in 1981 by Withers and later won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Song that year. Today it is regarded as one of the soul singer’s greatest hits and in 2020, it made a comeback after going viral on TikTok just months after Withers’ death aged 81.
The Art of Loving also featured tracks including “Nice to Each Other”, “Man I Need” and “So Easy (To Fall in Love)”, all of which made it into the top 10 spots on the UK Singles Chart last August.
Earlier this year, Dean, 27, broke the chart record for longest-running number one with musician Sam Fender after their track “Rein Me In” spent 19 non-consecutive weeks at the top spot.
“Completely lost for words,” Fender said at the time. “Thank you so much to Olivia Dean and the fans for making this song the juggernaut that it is. Can’t believe we broke the UK record!”
