Stella Lefty has another familiar-sounding song on her hands. This time, though, everyone involved knew about it before release.
“Summer You Were Mine,” a track from Lefty’s debut album Long Way Home, borrows from The Chicks‘ 1998 hit “There’s Your Trouble.” Fans noticed the resemblance after the album arrived on August 21st, but the original songwriters, Tia Sillers and Mark Selby, were initially missing from the credits on streaming services. Atlantic Records says that was a platform error: Lefty’s team had received clearance from Sony Publishing in June, and internal documents listed Sillers and Selby as writers before the album came out. Their names have since been added in the credits.
In practical terms, Lefty isn’t using an actual piece of The Chicks’ recording. Instead, “Summer You Were Mine” recreates recognizable aspects of the song. That’s an important distinction in music copyright — sampling uses audio from an existing recording, while this kind of borrowing deals with the melody, lyrics, or other parts of the song itself. Regardless, permission generally needs to be sorted out before release.
Sillers, who co-wrote “There’s Your Trouble” with her late husband Selby, doesn’t appear bothered by the new song. She told Rolling Stone that she hopes Lefty’s listeners might hear where the melody came from and discover The Chicks’ material in the process. “There’s Your Trouble” appeared on Wide Open Spaces and earned The Chicks a Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
The whole thing would probably register as standard songwriting business if Lefty hadn’t just spent the week explaining another song that was familiar. Her breakout single “Boston” drew comparisons to Noah Kahan‘s “Stick Season” immediately, particularly around its chorus. Kahan’s representatives eventually reached out about the similarity, and her team added him as a songwriter before the track was officially released rather than risk a legal dispute.
“When I was writing the song, I wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan,” Lefty recently told Vanity Fair. “I was literally thinking about nothing at all.” She said that after Kahan’s team approached hers, she had no issue sharing the credit: “I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, so I’m like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good.”
That explanation has gotten a little awkward after videos resurfaced this week showing Lefty repeatedly covering “Stick Season” on TikTok before her breakout, including clips in which she called Kahan one of her favorite artists and performed her own variations on the song.
Then there’s the green elephant in the room. Lefty, born Stella Lefkofsky, is the daughter of Groupon co-founder and Tempus AI CEO Eric Lefkofsky, whose fortune Forbes currently estimates at nearly $6 billion. Her background has already fueled plenty of “nepo baby” and “industry-plant” chatter around her rapid ascent, though Lefty has acknowledged that her family’s wealth gave her the freedom to pursue music full-time. Still, if your catalog is already generating this much paperwork, having a few billion dollars in the family probably doesn’t hurt.
All of this is happening amid an exceptionally quick rise for Lefty. After posting music online and a stint pursuing straightforward pop, she leaned fully into country at the end of 2025 and broke through soon afterward. Her debut album Long Way Home arrived last week, and she’s already mapped out a 2027 North American headlining run behind it. So, if the songwriting credits keep coming, she may want to reserve a bunk on the tour bus for her lawyer.
