Click here to read the full article.
“I like it when you’re nice to me,” Stella Lefty sings in the hook of her breakthrough single, “Boston.” To which we can only reply right now: Hope you’re not reading the comments.
Try to recall the last time there was
as much mass derision directed at one song as there is currently aimed at “Boston.” Would it have been back during quarantine, when Gal Gadot made everyone quesy with a highly mockable all-star cover of “Imagine”? Was it when Oliver Anthony became a quick cultural blip for his ingenious idea to fat-shame welfare recipients? Or would it have been when Jason Aldean was looking to make lynching cool again with “Try This in a Small Town”? But no, not even these examples approach the level of sheer enmity being laid upon what, on the surface, feels like as light-hearted and innocuous a single as anything any pop or country artist ever put down.
Lefty is as close as we get to a true overnight sensation… and also a near-overnight scapegoat. She is going to be punished for all of America’s sins, and also get a bunch of platinum certifications and possibly a couple of Grammy nominations, before this ride is all over. If she still has her head on her shoulders at the end of it all, then it might mark one of the most striking psychological survival stories since Monica Lewinsky came out OK after all. Because the feeding frenzy is staggering.
Of course, the pile-on feels even more justified to those inclined because everyone imagines Lefty crying — or being shamed — all the way to the bank. Because “Boston” is still looking like a Teflon hit, despite it seeming to make the entirety of the internet feel scorny. This week, it holds on yet again at No. 2 on the Hot 100, held back from the top spot only by Ella Langley’s indomitable, record-breaking “Choosin’ Texas,” which some would say paved the way, with the cement still wet, for “Boston.” There is a big part of the nation — maybe even a silent majority? — that’s just indifferent to or unaware of the fact that fellow citizens are being driven to paroxyms of deep sarcasm or rage by the song’s existence, and by the privilege they see in Lefty’s meteoric rise.
Those not chronically online may at this point be asking: Why they gotta be so mean?
Even prior to the release of “Boston,” when she was having a minor viral breakout with the song “Thinking ’bout You,” the 24-year-old singer began drawing some negative attention for the fact that she is the daughter of a billionaire. A six-times-over billionaire, to be exact, Groupon co-founder and Tempus AI CEO Eric Lefkofsky. Given that Lefty was plying her talent in a country or at least country-adjacent space, it was inevitable that a wealthy Illinoisan would face some thoughts along the lines of “I don’t think Hank done it that way.” Among people who don’t know country well enough to quote Waylon Jennings, the operative phrase was two of the most annoying words in the English language: “industry plant.” There was just one problem with the whisper campaign to bring Lefty’s career to an early halt: People loved “Boston”! Or a big portion of the mass public did, and they didn’t care that Lefty hadn’t had to work two waitress jobs to afford guitar lessons when her new signature song was this catchy and brought them that much joy.
But then came an obvious big reason it was catchy and brought joy: a key part of the chorus bore an unmistakable resemblance to Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season.” And not in the way where Sam Smith’s hit sounded a little like Tom Petty’s, or that Olivia Rodrigo was made to credit Taylor Swift because of a shared shoutiness. More in the kind of way where, once you became aware of the Lefty/Kahan similiarity, it was impossible to unhear it. Did that stand in the way of continuing to enjoy “Boston” for what it was — as a song that was at least a little bit delightful on its own terms? Yes, for some, and obviously not a big problem for others, with the song now approaching 300 million on-demand streams. But in the part of the public that thinks a great deal about egalitarianism and morality in music, Lefty had gone from “nepo” to “klepto” in one fell swoop, and now was being thought of by her antagonists as some kind of actual robber baron.
Probably everyone could agree that Lefty had not done herself many favors when it came to countering the idea that she had borrowed her best melodic idea. Credit was given to Kahan as a co-writer on the track, but that seemed to be at the instigation of his camp, once the song started going viral from her socials before its official release. When Lefty was asked about the apparently accidental Kahan “interpolation” in a Vanity Fair interview, she replied, “When I was writing the song, I wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan. I was literally thinking about nothing at all.” There are two serious problems with that answer: (1) Everyone who just thinks the song is banal quote-tweets it with the response, “We know.” (2) Evidence started mounting that Lefty seemed to have spent a good portion of her adult life thinking about Noah Kahan.
Suddenly much of the web went into prosecuting attorney mode. Because Lefty had spent years leading up to this building her brand by posting acoustic covers of established hits, as singer-songwriters of her generation are encouraged to do, she had left a long digital trail of Kahan adoration — not just posting how she would do anything to earn his attention but repeatedly putting up covers of “Stick Season.” Speaking of sticky, someone put together a mega-montage of her different versions of his signature song from the past few years, to the point that you could imagine that if Lefty truly wasn’t thinking about Kahan when she wrote “Boston,” it must’ve been one of the few times she wasn’t.
Evidence for the would-be prosecution accumulated further still when it came out that Lefty had given credit to the writers of the Dixie Chicks’ breakthrough hit “There’s Your Trouble” for an interpolaton of that song’s melody in her album track “Summer You Were Mine.” (Rolling Stone established that the credit had accidentally been left off for streaming services, but it had always been legally credited and intended, and the oversight was being rectified.) Needless to say, given the current unwanted attention, “Summer You Were Mine” will undoubtedly not be a follow-up single for Lefty.
Who knows what was really going through Lefty’s or her team’s minds as “Boston” started to take off, knowing that it was a minefield laden with gold and platinum? It may be possible that the young singer had “Stick Season” so ingrained into every fabric of her being that she wasn’t consciously copying the tune, and that once she let the public hear it before very much of the music industry had, it was too big a juggernaut to pull back. Co-crediting Kahan was the most obvious — and completely unavoidable — step to take in rectifying the situation. Admitting she had at least a subliminal influence, rather than claiming a brain with a completely blank slate, would have gone further in forestalling her current public-relations crisis.
One side benefit of the Lefty kerfuffle is the renewal of the eternal conversation over what constitutes plagiarism — which we can now nicely call interpolation, planned or otherwise — and what is fair game. As is often noted, there are 12 notes on the Western scale, which makes for a finite world of possibilities when it comes to quick hooks. I was intrigued by seeing references come up to the video where Charlie Puth shares his theory of what constitutes “interpolation”: up to four successive shared notes is fair game, he argues, but when you get to five, that’s when it’s time to share credit. Puth’s four-notes-or-less thesis has no legal standing — he just made it up — but it’s as good an argument as any to start or further these conversations. One young woman who clearly knows some music theory put up a video putting the melody of “Boston” up against “Stick Season” for comparison, finding that, once you transpose keys, Lefty’s song fails the Puth test for claiming originality. In the end, for the general public, it comes down less to rules about notes and bars than “I know it when I hear it.” And they know Kahan’s season of the stick even when it’s moved down from Vermont to Massacusetts.
But here’s the followup question not very many are asking: Should America — or the huge part of America that doesn’t think this is a big deal — be guilted into stopping loving “Boston,” or Lefty herself?
If you’re not overly consumed with “eat the rich” sentiment, it’s easy to see why “Boston” has become one of the biggest hits of 2026, borrowed elements or not. If Kahan had freely given “Stick Season” as a gift and Lefty had acknowledged it at the very top, we might be marveling at how she had transformed an existing hit into a fresh one that, ultimately, has a very different mood, theme and outcome. Music is always being adapted in alchemical ways, in ways that copyright lawyers can’t always comprehend and shouldn’t always constrain. The sin of “Boston” lie more in the lack of being completely unfront than in it being a bad song on its own admittedly compromised merits.
It’s also a bit scary seeing how some of the sentiment out there has grown darker way beyond the bounds of what should be acceptable even in snarky circles. If anyone wants to call her Stella Thefty, fine. But closing circles around who and what should be a part of country music is an unfortunate byproduct of the singer’s background or credit issues. And if you really go down the rabbit hole of comments about the controversy, you’ll run into a world of antisemitism that is truly frightening (but to be expected). We’ll leave that at that.
Here’s the argument in favor of “Boston,” unpopular as it might be right now: It’s winning because it’s winsome. Hearing Lefty sing “I like it when you’re nice to me” is the kind of bold, simple statement that transcends great lyricism — it’s heartwarming in the most basic kind of human way, stripping away all the other dross. Seeing Lefty scrunch up her face in delight at being desirable to a boyfriend is what the up side of pop is all about. Whatever anyone might have to say about her vocals, they’re appealing because her light rasp has a naturalness to it we rarely hear on the radio. Lefty became a newly minted star not because of her privilege but because she exudes approachability, even more so than a lot of country singers who came up from nothing. It’s not her fault, and maybe not her own doing, really, that she seems… nice. That can go a long way in 2026.
But we can’t undo the layers of filters we see these things through, so appreciating “Boston” will never seem uncomplicated, and maybe the same goes for Lefty herself. She’s unlikely to ever give her family fortune away, but she can come back with a song that makes as indelible an impression as “Boston” while striking everyone with its originality… in theory, if not in likelihood. America does love a redemption story. But, to paraphrase a famous line from Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood,” maybe nobody with a No. 2 hit that just won’t quit needs to be redeemed.
