Already gone by Kelly Clarkson and Halo by Beyonce
(…arise, zombie minion…)
There’s a distinct similarity between Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man”, ELP’s “Tiger in a Spotlight”, and the Sesame Street theme song.
Back on the chain gang…Pretenders
Fotos y recuerdos…Selena
Escape Club’s “Wild, Wild West” (1988) seems to borrow heavily from Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” (1978).
Sung to the tune of The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island, but not mentioned in #66 or #81
Amazing Grace
…which was written by Mozart
In addition to the other bits of classical music made into standard show songs, Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” is based on a phrase from a Dvorak piano trio - bit whether it was a conscious lift or not, I don’t know. Likewise, the Carlos Gardel tango song “Por Una Cabeza” (the tango in Scent of a Woman) opens with a phrase that occurs several times in at least one Mozart piece and I think another composer also used it.
Oh yes, and there was a big “wall of sound” disco number whose name I forget that uses the “big tune” from the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony.
The theme song for “Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego” (probably one of the best time-travelling detective shows based on a computer game ever) is based on “Die Entführung aus dem Serail.”
Of course, it would be perfectly in character for Carmen Sandiego to steal Mozart’s music just so she could have a theme song.
In 1961 the Don Shirley Trio had a minor hit with an instrumental version of the folk song Water Boy. There’s a section where the melody is nearly identical to the 1971 song Put Your Hand in the Hand, here performed by Ocean.
He wrote a set of variations on the tune. The tune itself was first published 20 years before his composition.
Frank Sinatra’s My Way uses the same tune as Claude Francois’s Comme d’Habitude
The lyrics are completely different (beyond being in different languages). The French song, if I understand it correctly, is about a couple who have fallen out of love, but continue their day to day routines (comme d’habitude)
I’ll Stand by You…Pretenders
Estoy Aquí…Shakira
Clearly the Pretenders enjoyed an ongoing musical dialogue with Latina female pop stars.
Not precisely the same, but the Cal and UCLA fight songs are pretty darn close.
Not exactly coincidental, but the old Slinky jingle sounds just like Ren and Stimpy’s Log commercial.
“What rolls down stairs
alone or in pairs,
and over your neighbor’s dog?
What’s great for a snack,
And fits on your back?
It’s log, log, log
It’s Lo-og, it’s Lo-og,
it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood
It’s Lo-og, it’s Lo-og,
It’s better than bad, it’s good”
Isn’t that the second movement of the Piano Quintet no. 2?
I had a listen to “Nature Boy” because the title sounded familiar. Yep, that’s the one, but I think it’s the first time I’ve seen the video. Captivating performance, I have to say. Nat looks like he’s about to melt (or something), and Oscar Moore’s playing is brilliant. Internet sez Moore laid bricks and ran a gas station in his later years. Died in Las Vegas in 1981, at 66 years of age. Damn.
The tune for Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and Adele’s “Rolling in the deep” are exactly the same, you can mash them together perfectly.
I stand corrected and beg its pardon.
The beats sound really similar. May just be because Gavin wanted to do a riff on Igor’s stuff since Spider-Man 2018 and Sunset Overdrive were published by the same people, but still.
ABBA released two songs with the same melody: Happy Hawaii & Why Did it Have to be Me?
I was going to make a joke about the band Train playing “Heart and Soul” during their beginner’s piano lesson and changing the words to make Play That Song, but when I looked it up I see that they gave Hoagy Carmichael writing credits so it probably sorta happened that way.