Olivia Dean is facing claims that one of her songs is a quote from R&B legend Bill Withers’ classic hit.
The London-born Grammy winner, 27, is facing a new lawsuit alleging that Withers stole a tune from “Just the Two of Us” on “I’ve Seen It,” the closing track of his 1981 hit album “The Art of Loving,” NBC News reporter Joe Fryer reported Oct. 5 on TODAY.
The lawsuit was filed against Dean’s music labels and publisher by Mattie Music Group, the publisher of Withers’ music catalogue. Dean and “I Saw” writers Bastian Langebaek and Max Wolfgang are not directly named as defendants.
The lawsuit alleges that the similarities between some of the melodies in “I’ve Seen It” and “Just the Two of Us,” which Withers wrote with William Salter and Ralph MacDonald and recorded with saxophonist Grover Washington Jr., are “obvious and unavoidable.”
Specifically, the lawsuit compares the melody around the lyrics in Dean’s song, “I hear you connecting in every song and still the words all come out wrong,” to the melody around the lyrics in Withers’ song, “I see crystal raindrops falling and the beauty of it all…”
The lawsuit claims that the common musical characteristics of the two songs are “so striking” that they “do not result from coincidence, independent creation, or reliance on common musical elements.”
Dean, who won Best New Artist at the 2026 Grammy Awards and is known for current pop hits “Man I Need” and “It’s So Easy (To Fall in Love”), talked about being inspired by classic R&B music during an October 2025 visit to TODAY.
“I love writing songs, and I love Motown and soul music, Aretha Franklin, music that makes you feel things and tells a story. I think it’s timeless,” Dean said.
The new case reignites a thorny debate in the music world that has been going on for decades: Where is the line between artistic inspiration and theft?
Music journalist Tomás Mier told Fryer that there has been an increase in music copyright lawsuits in recent years. “These properties are a lot more meticulous about sound similarities and a little more litigious,” Mier said.
In 2015, the family of R&B legend Marvin Gaye won a historic copyright infringement lawsuit by successfully suing singers Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, arguing that their 2013 hit “Blurred Lines” infringed the copyright of Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up.”
A federal court and later an appeals court agreed that “Blurred Lines” copied Gaye’s beat, ordering Thicke and Williams to pay nearly $5 million to Gaye’s estate in a final judgment of the case.
More recently, British singer Ed Sheeran won against the family of one of Gaye’s songwriters in a legal battle alleging that Sheeran’s 2014 hit “Thinking Out Loud” copied elements of Gaye’s 1973 hit “Let’s Get It On.”
In May 2023, a Manhattan federal jury unanimously ruled that Sheeran and “Thinking Out Loud” co-writer Amy Wadge did not steal their songs from Gaye.
While the case was ongoing, Sheeran criticized such cases in a video he shared on social media.
Sheeran explained in his video that “coincidences” are “inevitable to happen” in songwriting.
“This is really hurting the songwriting industry,” Sheeran said. “Pop music uses too many notes and too few chords.