Credit: Melissa Ruggieri
Credit: Melissa Ruggieri
[Update 1/29: Tom Petty tells Billboard that the Smith song similarities were a "musical accident" and that the word "lawsuit" was never mentioned. Read more here. ]
BY MELISSA RUGGIERI
Sam Smith backed down pretty quickly in the name of fairness.
The British crooner broke through in a massive way in 2014 with his gospel-tinged ballad of yearning, “Stay With Me.”
But, according to Billboard , Tom Petty's team noticed similarities in the Grammy-nominated song with Petty's 1989 hit, "I Won't Back Down" and reached out to Smith's representative.
While Smith’s camp swears they were not familiar with the Petty song, written with Jeff Lynne, they acknowledged the similarity and “all involved came to an immediate and amicable agreement.”
Now, Petty and Lynne are credited as co-writers of "Stay with Me," along with Smith, James Napier and William Phillips and will receive 12.5 percent of songwriting royalties (though it isn't clear if they'll be retroactively compensated).
The agreement was apparently tendered last fall, but the details have only now surfaced.
Somehow, it doesn’t seem likely that Petty or Lynne will pop up onstage if “Stay” wins the Song of the Year Grammy.
Smith, meanwhile, launched his current tour in Atlanta earlier this month and closed his show with the song that has sold almost 3.5 million copies in the U.S.
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