Tim: There is something about this, from early last year, that utterly ruins it for me; I don’t want to say what it is, in case it’s not as blindingly obvious to you as it is to me.
Tim: Just me?
Tom: No. Not just you. That’s astonishing.
Tim: Yep, figured. So, you want to be a successful Swedish pop-rock singer, you decide to take basically the chorus of one of the biggest hits of one of the biggest pop-rock bands of all time, sing basically the melody of a highly successful pop-rock track from the biggest pop-rock band of all time and hope that none of the lawyers notice.
Tom: To translate his comments from an article: “These chords are used by so very many groups; I can name at least five songs that sound the same way. ‘Heaven’ by Bryan Adams is of course much closer!”
Tim: Erm…
Tom: Uh-huh. Sure it is. You didn’t just use the chords, you used the same instrumentation and timing — it’s not just the same chords as the Killers, it sounds exactly the same as them. Another Swedish source simply calls it “blatant plagiarism“.
Tim: It was disappointing more than anything, really – I heard it on the radio when I woke up and thought, oh, I like this song, and a bit later thought, wait, what? Later, and more cogently, I looked it up on YouTube and realised it wasn’t some weird re-sung mashup but actually an ‘original’ song (and boy, do I use that term loosely). So now my question’s basically: why would anyone choose to play this when there are two better songs out there?