The other day I was listening to Dua Lipa, like you do, when I realized something that really should have occurred to me years ago: I’ve heard that song before.

Rappers sample all the time, it’s a foundational part of the genre. Tupac borrows from a hook by Bruce Hornsby, Dr. Dre borrows a beat from Ducky from “NCIS;” it’s how it goes. But other artists in other genres use samples, too. Sometimes openly with credit to the original songwriter, sometimes… less so.

So let’s dive into songs you may not have realized weren’t original songs. Sorry if this destroys some part of you. Some of them did for me.

Dua Lipa — “Break My Heart” / INXS — “Need You Tonight”

This one is subtle, but not so subtle that Dua Lipa’s label didn’t preemptively credit INXS as cowriters of the song.

Do you hear it? It’s in the chorus. “I should have stayed… at… home” is to the same beat as the instrumental in the INXS chorus. Which is my excuse for missing it for so many years, until one day I was working with this song on and thought, wait, is this that one song from the ’80s?

I would say it explains why I love “Break My Heart” so much when I’m generally not a fan of modern pop music, but I actually don’t like INXS very much. So props to Dua Lipa for fixing the song. Way to go.

[Gokhman note: Much of Dua Lipa’s music comes from other artists. So much that it’s become a meme].

The Verve — “Bitter Sweet Symphony” / The Andrew Oldham Orchestra  — “The Last Time”

This one has layers and it went to court.

If you listen to “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” it’s hard to hear The Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time” in it. I certainly don’t. But if you listen to Stones’ collaborator Andrew Oldham’s instrumental version… yeah, there it is. Exact same melody. Uncannily close.

Initially, the Verve negotiated with the Stones’ record label for the rights to use the melody, but the label didn’t actually own the rights. They were owned by the Stones’ old manager, Allen Klein. And as it turns out the strings weren’t even the part that lost the lawsuit for them! A musicologist determined that the “Bitter Sweet Symphony” vocal melody is just the vocal melody from “The Last Time” at half speed. Which it totally is once you know to listen for it!

Their big hit was basically just the Stones’ first big hit taken apart and reassembled. Only steal from the best, I guess.

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Coldplay — “Viva La Vida” / Joe Satriani — “If I Could Fly”

There’s been at least three plagiarism accusations against Coldplay for this song, but the one I’m focusing on is Joe Satriani’s because it’s the one I heard when I first heard “Viva La Vida” in a commercial. It was an immediate “Wait a second…” situation.

Listen to the Coldplay vocal melody, then listen to Satriani’s song starting at around 49 seconds.

Satriani obviously sued, and he was right because though the terms were undisclosed, Coldplay presumably settled. On the one hand, I can understand why they’d try it. Satriani is one of the greatest guitar players who’s ever lived but he’s not a household name. But he’s taught Steve Vai in New York then, after moving to Berkeley, taught Kevin Cadogan from Third Eye Blind, Alex Skolnick from Testament, Larry LaLonde from Primus, David Bryson from Counting Crows and Kirk Hammett from Metallica. So he could call in some favors to afford a really good lawyer.

Britney Spears — “Toxic” / “Tere Mere Beech Mein” from “Ek Duuje Ke Liye”

I know I’m putting the famous one first, but listen to “Tere Mere Beech Mein” first. If you’re like me you’ll go, “Oh snap, that’s ‘Toxic!'” Maybe you’ll use different phrasing, if you’re not old.

“Ek Duuje Ke Liye” is a Bollywood movie and the writers of “Toxic” openly used it, though there’s no songwriter credit for the original. They basically cut pieces out of the original and mixed them up for the South Asian vibe they were looking for, and they re-recorded part of it near the end.

Hopefully someone in India got paid for this. Other than the guy who got 135 million views on YouTube for the clip, I mean.

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Dua Lipa — “Love Again” / White Town — “Your Woman”

Yes, I’m picking on Dua Lipa again, but she does this a lot. Also this is kind of a technicality.

The trumpet line is clearly the same. It’s distinctive enough that there’s no way someone stumbled on it twice. And I guarantee either she or her songwriters heard that trumpet in White Town’s “Your Woman” from 1997 because, while it’s not huge, it does still get airplay in ’90s alt-rock circles.

So why isn’t Jyoti Mishra, the sole member of White Town, credited? Because he didn’t write it, either. Mishra lifted it from “My Woman,” a song written by Bing Crosby and recorded by Lew Stone in 1932. So both songs credit the original writers Crosby, Max Wartell and Irving Walkman.

But let’s be honest here, there’s no way any of the other four people on the Dua Lipa version busted out their Edison wax cylinder to listen to the 1932 song for inspiration. They probably had to look it up like I did.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis and send column ideas to him at @bayareadata.press on BlueSky.