Adele’s worldwide smash “Hello”; has racked up major sales totals and captured the globe’s attention, but is it a lift of a song from over forty years ago?
The UK singing superstar has been accused of plagiarizing the 1973 Tom Waits tune “Martha.”; The two songs revolve around a telephone conversation with an ex-lover with some saying that they’re a tad too similar in subject matter.
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“Hello, hello there, is this Martha? / This is old Tom Frost, and I’m calling long distance. Don’t worry ’bout the cost / Cause it’s been 40 years or more, now Martha please recall / Meet me out for coffee, where we’ll talk about it all,”; sings Waits on his Closing Time cut.
Adele’s tune also has a phone-based request or a chat.
“Hello, it’s me / I was wondering if after all these years / You’d like to meet, to go over everything,”; she sings.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Greg Kurstin noted that Tom Waits did provide a bit of inspiration for Adele’s latest album.
“She didn’t want to just go through and write a pop song with any particular formula,”; he said. “We talked about Tom Waits, and different storytellers like that. I think that was the idea, that we wanted to do something that was very honest about where she was at right now, and she wanted to do something that was real and believable.”;
Do you think Adele’s new hit is too similar in subject to “Martha?”; Check out the two songs below and tweet us with your thoughts!
