Former Fleetwood Mac member Lindsey Buckingham has given two songwriters retroactive credits on a track he accidentally plagiarised. Buckingham has paid Jordon Zadorozny of Blinker The Star and Brad Laner of Medicine a flat sum for the mistake. The co-writing credits are for his recent track ‘Swan Song’, which was found to have plagiarised ‘Mind’s Eye’ by the pair.
It was Zadorozny who noticed that Buckingham’s song, which features on his recent self-titled album, was eerily similar to him and Laner’s old collaborative effort, both musically and lyrically, as he explained in an interview with SPIN.
As the report in SPIN claims, Zadorozny actually met Buckingham back in 2000 when he was signed to DreamWorks. When asked by the label’s president who he wanted to produce his next record, he picked Buckingham.
“It’s something I used to think about as a high school kid going to bed at night,” he recalled. “It was pure fantasy. ‘Out of all my heroes, who could I work with?’ And then it was, ‘Wow, this is actually happening.’”
Buckingham went on to produce two songs for Zadorozny. They also had studio sessions with Laner on bass duties. When the sessions had ended, Laner gave Buckingham an album of songs he and Zadorozny had written, in case he ever wanted to use them. 20 years later, Zadorozny heard ‘Swan Song’ and realised it was his.
“He’s got years of integrity and no reason to be stealing songs from anyone, especially us,” Zadorozny stated. “He’d taken our song, made a demo himself of it, put it away for a rainy day and, as it turns out, 16 or 17 years later found that demo and thought, ‘This is a cool thing I did back in 2000.’”
In a statement provided to SPIN, Buckingham’s management explained the mix-up: “Following the recent release of Lindsey’s self-titled album, it was brought to his attention that significant elements of the song ‘Swan Song,’ had come from a song that had been shared with him more than 20 years ago while he was working in a Los Angeles studio, producing some music for Brad Laner and Jordon Zadorozny.”
It concluded: “When this unintentional and inadvertent usage was raised to Lindsey, he quickly realised his mistake and a friendly resolution was made by all parties.
