Getting a retroactive writing credit forced on you because your song sounds too much like someone else's is one of the most embarrassing things that can happen in pop music. And yet here we are with Stella Lefty, Chicago pop-country artist, Groupon heiress, and now co-writer on a Noah Kahan track she claims she'd never even thought about.
What Actually Happened
Lefty — born Stella Lefkofsky — released a song called "Boston" on her Is This Heaven? EP earlier this year. It blew up on TikTok and climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Impressive stuff. The small issue is that "Boston" liberally interpolates "Stick Season," Kahan's signature hit, to the point where when you hear it on the radio your first instinct is to wonder whether people have started covering Noah Kahan already.
Between the TikTok breakout and the song's official release, Kahan's team got in touch. They had noticed the resemblance — which, to be fair to them, is putting it mildly. Lefty's response was to hand Kahan a retroactive writing credit, which is the correct move, even if it took someone else's lawyers making a phone call to get there.
Her explanation in a Vanity Fair profile — timed around the release of her debut album Long Way Home — was that the interpolation was entirely unintentional. "When I was writing the song, I wasn't thinking about Noah Kahan," she said. "I was literally thinking about nothing at all." As for the credit: "I don't want to step on anybody's toes, so I'm like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good."
The Generosity of "Whatever, All Good"
We'll give her the benefit of the doubt on the unintentional part. Ears absorb things, melodies get lodged somewhere and resurface without the conscious brain flagging the source. It happens. What's harder to give a pass on is the framing — treating a song that sounds a lot like an existing hit as a minor administrative inconvenience, something to shrug off with "whatever, all good."
The reality is that "Boston" reached number two on the Hot 100. That's not a small thing. The melodic debt to "Stick Season" isn't a subtle nod or a passing influence — it's the kind of resemblance that makes people stop and do a double take when it comes on the radio. Kahan's team were right to pick up the phone, and retroactive credits, while better than nothing, are rarely handed over out of pure generosity. They tend to be the outcome of a quiet conversation that nobody involved wants to describe in detail.
None of which makes "Boston" a bad song. But the framing of this whole episode — unintentional, no big deal, wasn't even thinking about him — is doing a lot of work to make a fairly clear-cut situation sound breezy. Vanity Fair, to their credit, apparently assessed whether Lefty qualifies as a nepo baby in the same piece. She technically doesn't, we're told.
Whether she wrote half her biggest hit or not is, apparently, also a matter of some debate.
Our take: The song sounds like "Stick Season." Kahan's team noticed. She gave him the credit. That's the whole story — and dressing it up as a carefree "all good" doesn't really change what it is.