Edmonton, Alberta musician Connor Shaw claims the writers of Jason Aldean's No. 1 hit "You Make It Easy" stole the song from him. In a Twitter thread, Shaw lays out his claims.
Florida Georgia Line's Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard wrote "You Make It Easy" alongside Morgan Wallen and Jordan Schmidt. Jason Aldean released the song as the first single from his album Rearview Town on February 5, 2018.
But Shaw claims the writers stole significant portions of the song from his 2015 song "Easy."
"In 2015 I wrote and recorded a song titled 'Easy,'" Shaw says on Twitter. "At the time, I was an amateur songwriter who was mainly writing and recording for classes in my music degree."
Shaw says the instructor really enjoyed the song, so he put together a quick rough recording and put it up on YouTube. "My song was by no means well recorded or even finished by my personal standards," Shaw says. "But it was something I could post online for the enjoyment of my friends and family."
One of those family members apparently lives and works as a songwriter in Nashville. She asked Shaw to send some music to send around (and Shaw has the saved messages to prove it).
Shaw says that happened in October 2017 and he didn't hear anything afterwards. But then Aldean's song came out. "After listening for the first minute of the song I came to the shocking realization that 'You Make It Easy' uses the same hook and melody as my song," Shaw says.
He then made a side-by-side comparison of the two tracks. Shaw also claims that many of the lyrical ideas borrowed from his track.
After listening to the song over and over again, I started to notice a striking number of lyrical similarities as well.
Here are those: pic.twitter.com/KO49A8zyut
— Connor Shaw (CS Kid) (@Curlyshaw) May 15, 2018
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Shaw says he did more digging on the song and found out "You Make It Easy" was written sometime in January 2018. An entertainment attorney offered to help Shaw make his claims.
But, as you'd expect, Florida Georgia Line attorney Jess Rosen responded with a fiery retort. Shaw says the response was disheartening. "Essentially their lawyer responded with a long-winded and incredibly condescending letter informing us that no matter what we did we would never have enough money to out-lawyer their team," he says. "They strong-armed me by calling out my financial situation."
You can read that full legal response, posted by ET Canada here.
For his part, Shaw says he's pretty much stuck. "I'm almost certain that I sound crazy," he tweets. "I just can't shake this feeling that my song was taken from me and I can't do anything about it. In 2018, David gets his ass kicked by Goliath."
