So last week I was listening to WDCB, best local jazz station, and was pleasantly surprised to hear an improvised treatment of “And No Sunshine When She’s Gone.” But as the track continued, I found I was actuallyhumming along to “Summer Kisses Winter Tears.”
Putting aside intentional references/samples/quotes and the notorious cases of adjudicated copyright theft, can you think of any other such examples?
(I was going to include “The Streets of Laredo” and “Bang the Drum Slowly” till I remembered they’re the same song, just different verses.)
La Bamba and Twist and Shout are the same to me. Don’t know if I am the only one to hear that or whether this has resulted in some copyright infringement procedure
The Kinks’ first two big hits, “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” are so similar that, when I hear one or the other, I have to listen for a few seconds to suss out which one of the two that I’m actually hearing.
First there was Move It On Over by Hank Williams. Then there was Rock Around The Clock by Bill Hailey And His Comets. They don’t start out identically, but there are points where, if you cut in, I couldn’t tell you which I was listening to. Nothing adjudicated that I’m aware of.
If you’re referring to the Kinks song “Destroyer” (with the chorus “Paranoia, the destroyer”), then, yes, those two are really similar, as well, with pretty much the exact same guitar riff.
But, when I google “Is You Really Got Me similar to All Day and All Of the Night”, I get a number of hits on articles in which others feel that they are essentially the same song, so it’s not just me.
The Paramount Television “theme” is very close to a sequence of five notes from the main theme from Star Wars. Every time I hear the Paramount theme, my brain fills in the next note from Star Wars.
To me, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” and “Putin’ on the Ritz” sound almost the same, to the point where if I’m listening to the former my brain will fill in lyrics from the latter. My brain will want to replace the line “That’s nobody’s business but the Turks” with “Putin’ on the Ritz”, for example.
