Miley Cyrus and her co-writers are facing a lawsuit in relation to her 2023 song Flowers, which became one of the biggest hits of the year. It’s alleged that this copies elements of Bruno Mars’ 2013 song, When I Was Your Man.
But there’s a twist: it seems that the legal action is being brought not by Mars himself, but by a company called Tempo Music Investments which, according to The Guardian, claims to own a piece of When I Was Your Man that it purchased from Philip Lawrence, one of the song’s co-writers.
As well as Cyrus, Tempo Music is also bringing the action against Gregory Hein and Michael Pollack, Flowers’ co-writers, and Sony Music Publishing, Apple, Target, Walmart and other companies, who are named because they distributed the song.
The lawsuit, which has been seen by Rolling Stone, is said to claim that “Any fan of Bruno Mars’ When I Was Your Man knows that Miley Cyrus’s Flowers did not achieve all of that success on its own. Flowers duplicates numerous melodic, harmonic, and lyrical elements of When I Was Your Man, including the melodic pitch design and sequence of the verse, the connecting bassline, certain bars of the chorus, certain theatrical music elements, lyric elements, and specific chord progressions.
“It is undeniable based on the combination and number of similarities between the two recordings that Flowers would not exist without When I Was Your Man. With Flowers, Cyrus, Hein, and Pollack have created a derivative work of When I Was Your Man without authorisation.”
It's previously been speculated that Flowers might reference When I Was Your Man, which includes the lines "...That I should've bought you flowers, and held your hand." In Cyrus’s song, which was written and released in the wake of her divorce from actor Liam Hemsworth, the star celebrates her new-found independence with the words “I can buy myself flowers,” later adding that “I can hold my own hand”.
Mars has never publicly commented on the alleged connection between Flowers and When I Was Your Man, but is not named as a plaintiff in Tempo Music’s lawsuit. Nor, apparently, are Ari Levine and Andrew Wyatt, the song's other co-writers aside from the aforementioned Philip Lawrence.
Speaking to Music Week earlier this year about the lyrical content of Flowers, producer Kid Harpoon said that “it could feel sad, but to me Miley is one of the most empowering artists and you want to lean into that. We talked about the lyrics in terms of, ‘This isn’t me being weak, oh poor me.’ It’s like, ‘No, I buy my own fucking flowers, I can hold my own hand!’ Miley used to say in the studio, ‘I don’t need you, bitch!’”
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