Miley Cyrus hit with lawsuit over claims Flowers ‘copied’ this well-known Bruno Mars song
Miley Cyrus is being sued over her single ‘Flowers’. (Getty)
Pansexual pop princess Miley Cyrus and the co-writers of her Grammy Award-winning single “Flowers” are being sued for allegedly “copying” portions of Bruno Mars’ hit, “When I Was Your Man”.
In a lawsuit filed at a Los Angeles federal court on Monday (16 September), Tempo Music Investments – which owns a portion of the copyright of Mars’ 2012 hit – accused Miley Cyrus and “Flowers” co-writers Gregory Hein and Michael Pollack of unauthorised “exploitation” of the song.
The lawsuit also names companies including Sony Music Publishing, Apple, Target, and Walmart, who are accused of distributing the song. Tempo Music Investments is seeking an as-yet undetermined amount in damages, and is seeking to prevent Cyrus from performing or profiting from the song any further.
The music investment platform is able to bring the case forward as it purchased some of the copyright of “When I Was Your Man” from its co-writer Philip Lawrence. Mars himself, and his co-writers Ari Levine and Andrew Wyatt, are not named as plaintiffs in the case.
Despite there being evident stylistic and genre differences between the two songs – Mars’s is a piano-led ballad, Cyrus’s is a straight-up pop bop with disco and rock influences – there are notable parallels between the songs’ lyrics.
On “When I Was Your Man”, Mars croons: “I should’ve bought you flowers and held your hand. Shoulda gave you all my hours, when I had the chance. Take you to every party, ‘cause all you wanted to do was dance. Now my baby’s dancin’, but she’s dancin’ with another man.”
When “Flowers” was released last January, some fans picked up on the lyrics seemingly answering Mars’ confessions from the perspective of the woman he lost. Others noted the likelihood that “Flowers” was simply about Cyrus’s ex-husband, actor Liam Hemsworth.
“I can buy myself flowers, write my name in the sand. Talk to myself for hours, say things you don’t understand,” Cyrus belts on the chorus. “I can take myself dancing and I can hold my own hand. Yeah, I can love me better than you can.”
Upon its release, “Flowers” became the best-selling single of 2023, topping the charts in the US for eight weeks and the UK for ten weeks, and earning Cyrus her first ever Grammy.
However, the lawsuit suggests that Cyrus’s song could not have achieved the success it did without “When I Was Your Man”.
“Any fan of Bruno Mars’ ‘When I Was Your Man’ knows that Miley Cyrus’s ‘Flowers’ did not achieve all of that success on its own,” the suit reads, as per Variety.
“‘Flowers’ duplicates numerous melodic, harmonic, and lyrical elements of ‘When I Was Your Man’, including the melodic pitch design and sequence of the verse, the connecting bass line, certain bars of the chorus, certain theatrical music elements, lyric elements, and specific chord progressions.
“It is undeniable based on the combination and number of similarities between the two recordings that ‘Flowers’ would not exist without When I Was Your Man. With Flowers, Cyrus, Hein and Pollack have created a derivative work of ‘When I Was Your Man’ without authorisation.”
During a 2023 interview with Billboard, Pollack refused to be drawn on comparisons between Mars and Cyrus’s two songs.
PinkNews has contacted representatives for Miley Cyrus and Bruno Mars for comment.
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