[tboswell]

Jean-Luc Goddard (undoubted genius) once said "it's not where you take things from it's where you take them to".

We are all a product of our pasts and probably consciously or unconciously take little bits from different places. And stuff will always remind people of stuff. I almost never worry about it except when I get a lyrical idea that seems too good to be true and so needs to be Googled...

Spot on there! Widen your listening, keeping sucking up more influences and what comes out will be varied enough to be your own creation

Tom.

[GuyBarry]

Spot on there! Widen your listening, keeping sucking up more influences and what comes out will be varied enough to be your own creation

This sounds like the songwriting version of that old one-liner "If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research" 

[GTB]

There has to be a lot of leeway here, we all use the same words and grammar every day, new phrases become part of common usage etc. If one person writes a song using "get your act together" or "at the end of the day" etc it can't mean no one else can use it. I've been writing a lot of songs about songs recently so I may be on thin ice with some stuff, e.g.
    "Are you holding out for a hero, on the road to nowhere,
      We don't need another hero, things can only get better".

However, I think I'm safe with
    "Hey Jimi, where you going with that guitar in your hand"
Or
    "The judge said, 'I have heard my sweet lord'".

- hopefully safer than George was 😉

I've quoted musical phrases, riffs and song lines all over the place for this project but I'm ploughing on regardless.
See you in jail,
GTB

[hardtwistmusic]

Legally, (in the United States anyway) you cannot "plagiarize yourself."   The precedent for this came in a lawsuit that John Fogarty's publisher filed against Fogarty.  The publisher sued, claiming that songs he (the publisher) had a financial interest in were being plagiarized to create songs he did NOT have a financial interest in.  

The judge ruled that those chords that Fogarty had in his head (like you do) could not be "plagiarized".  The ruling was that, (if this was ruled "plagiarism" it would be impossible for Fogarty to NOT plagiarize himself to some extent with those "songs in his head" and that to rule this "plagiarism" would be an unfair "restraint of trade" and would stifle the creative process if an artist had to exclude his prior creations from his current creative process.  

So... from a legal perspective, (if you live in the U.S.) you are home free.  Hope that helps.

Oh.... and one more thing.   I listen to a LOT of music from a LOT of different eras.   I hear parts of "something else" in as much as 90% of what I listen to.  Letting that "ruin" the new song is a choice I can make or not make.  EVERYTHING is derivative.  EVERYTHING. 

[Paulski]

Steve Earle:

Good songwriters borrow, great ones steal!

Isaac Newton:

If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants

[CMUK]

I wouldn't worry about it too much. As long as you write honestly, in your own voice and are true to that and not actually trying to rip off somebody else, then no problem. All the great songs that have already been written are tools to help you be creative. Stuck for a song idea, listen to someone else! Try and write in the skin of another singer, 9 times out of ten you'll come up with something original even though it might be influenced by something else.

[GuyBarry]

I wouldn't worry about it too much. As long as you write honestly, in your own voice and are true to that and not actually trying to rip off somebody else, then no problem.

I have to disagree I'm afraid.   As I said earlier, accidental plagiarism can be a really annoying distraction for some listeners - and it's presumably the effect on the listeners that the writer should be concerned about.

I gave a further example in the "Somebody stole my tune" thread recently.  I was listening to "Sounds of the 70s" on Radio 2 and a song came on that I hadn't heard before, but which was strikingly reminiscent of the former "Grandstand" TV theme tune, to the extent that the first couple of bars of the refrain were an exact copy rhythmically, harmonically and melodically.  As a consequence I spent most of the next few minutes not listening to the song but thinking about Bob Wilson and Football Focus.  (And it wasn't just me - I spoke to a friend who writes songs later in the day.  She'd heard it too and had the same reaction.)  I'm quite sure that the songwriter didn't intend this reaction.

I've noticed that TV theme tunes seem to be particularly prone to accidental plagiarism, maybe because they can become so familiar that people erroneously believe that they're in the public domain.  In my view they should be avoided at all costs because for many listeners they create such a strong association with the TV programme.  As an example, here's "Gala Performance" by Laurie Johnson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8SZdTCEjZw

Did anyone not instantly think of a certain well-known title?  And yet the tune wasn't even written for the programme - it was just a piece of library music that happened to fit the words in the title.

Now imagine if a songwriter had accidentally included that same sequence of notes in a song, but with different lyrics - say "You Are My Joy".  Don't you think that most people would be thinking about a certain red book instead?

(Having said that, I must confess that the opening phrase of one of my recent songs echoes the first six notes of the 1970 US TV series "Quincy M.E.".  I'm hoping the rest is sufficiently different that most people don't notice.)

What would be really useful in my opinion would be a website where you could input a few notes of a melody and see if anyone else has used it.  Denys Parsons did something similar with his book "A Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes" back in 1975, but I don't know if anything like that exists on the internet today.  It ought to.

[MartynRich]

I am a member of the Songwriters Guild and one piece of advice from them is that if a song you write feels familiar, it could just be that its an excellent piece of commercial songwriting.