Stealing Like a Songwriter

Robert Plant once described Led Zeppelin’s early records as a kind of excavation — digging through the American blues tradition and hauling it into a different century. What he was less eager to discuss, at least for many years, was how close some of that excavation came to outright theft. Riffs, verses, whole melodic structures borrowed from Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf — sometimes credited, often not. The lawsuits came later. But something interesting lives in that tension between the borrowing and the result, because whatever you think of the ethics, nobody would argue that Led Zeppelin IV sounds like a Chicago blues record. Somewhere between the source and the finished thing, something genuinely new happened.

That transformation — the gap between what you took and what you made — is the entire territory of what Austin Kleon called “stealing like an artist.” His book of that name is slim and illustrated, aimed broadly at creative people, and it can feel a little lightweight if you come at it with serious artistic ambitions. But the core insight is real and deep, and it applies to songwriting in ways Kleon himself only gestures at. The idea is simply this: nothing comes from nowhere, all creative work builds on what came before, and the difference between a hack and an artist isn’t whether they borrow — it’s what they do with what they take.

The Imitation Phase Nobody Talks About

Every songwriter you admire spent years sounding exactly like someone else. This is not a shameful secret. It is the mechanism by which craft is transferred from one generation to the next. You cannot learn to write songs by reading about it. You learn by absorbing records obsessively, by playing along until you understand not just the notes but the decisions — why the verse stays quiet there, why the chorus strips back instead of swelling, why the bridge disrupts the key.

Bob Dylan arrived in New York wearing Woody Guthrie like a costume. The phrasing, the imagery, the studied Dust Bowl world-weariness — he was performing his influence as much as himself. But that total immersion was the education. By the time he shed Guthrie’s skin on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he’d absorbed enough to have something of his own to say. The imitation was the curriculum.

Joni Mitchell talked about learning guitar from tutor books and then throwing them out, developing her open tunings by ear, building a harmonic language entirely unlike anything else in folk or pop because she came at the instrument sideways. But she still spent years inside the music of her time before she knew enough to deviate meaningfully from it. Song to a Seagull is still recognisably a late-sixties folk record. Court and Spark is not recognisably anything except Joni Mitchell.

The imitation phase is where you build the vocabulary. The transformation phase is where you learn to speak in your own voice. You can’t skip the first step, and staying too long in it is its own trap.

What It Means to Transform

Transformation in songwriting isn’t about changing a few chords so the influence becomes legally undetectable. That’s the cynical version, the way session hacks think about it. Real transformation is when the source material gets metabolised so thoroughly that it comes out as something that could only have been made by you, in your particular moment, with your particular set of obsessions and blind spots and experiences.

Consider what Billie Eilish and Finneas did with the sonic language of ASMR, of whisper culture, of lo-fi bedroom aesthetics. None of those things were invented by them. The intimacy of hushed vocals over minimal production had existed in various forms for years — Elliott Smith built a career on it, Sufjan Stevens went there repeatedly, the whole sadcore movement of the nineties was built in that neighbourhood. But Eilish arrived at the sound through her own route, filtered it through a very specific Gen Z alienation and hyper-online self-awareness, and produced something that felt genuinely new to a generation who had never encountered Elliott Smith.

That’s not cultural appropriation in the pejorative sense. That’s how music works. Influence flows, gets filtered through new sensibilities, and re-emerges altered.

Or take the way Vampire Weekend absorbed Graceland-era Paul Simon — the South African township rhythms, the jangly guitars, the unexpected chord inversions — and ran it through an Ivy League collegiate filter and an indie rock production sensibility. The influence is audible if you know where to listen. But Vampire Weekend the album sounds nothing like Graceland. The sources became building materials for an entirely different structure.

The Difference Between Influence and Plagiarism

This is where the ethics become genuinely complex, and where a lot of songwriters tie themselves in knots trying to navigate the creative and the legal simultaneously. They’re not the same conversation.

Legally, copyright protects specific fixed expressions — a particular melody, a specific lyrical phrase, a recorded performance. It does not protect chord progressions, which is why thousands of songs can share the same I–V–vi–IV sequence without any of their writers having a claim against the others. It does not protect rhythm patterns in the abstract. It does not protect a general vibe or approach. The “Blurred Lines” verdict in 2015 rattled many people in the industry because it seemed to push copyright toward protecting feel and groove rather than specific notes, but that case was unusual, contested, and probably represents an overcorrection that courts will walk back over time.

Creatively and ethically, the conversation is more nuanced than the law allows for. When Led Zeppelin lifted lyrics wholesale from Willie Dixon and didn’t credit him for decades, that was wrong — not just legally, but in terms of basic respect for where the music came from. The blues tradition was built by Black American artists under conditions of enormous systemic disadvantage, and the appropriation of that tradition by white British and American artists who received all the commercial benefit is a genuinely uncomfortable part of rock history.

Acknowledging your sources is not just ethical hygiene. It’s intellectually honest, and it’s part of the broader creative conversation that music is. When you cite your influences openly — when you talk about who shaped you, when you acknowledge that a song came from sitting inside someone else’s record for three months — you’re participating in the genealogy of music rather than pretending to have arrived from nowhere.

The genealogy is the point. It’s where the richness lives.

How the Great Ones Actually Did It

Paul Simon has always been unusually candid about his sources. He talked openly about learning guitar technique from records, about the specific American Songbook writers who shaped his harmonic instincts, about what he took from Andean folk music for The Paul Simon Songbook and later from South African and Brazilian music. That transparency doesn’t diminish the songs. It illuminates them.

Jeff Buckley’s Grace is saturated in influence — you can hear Nina Simone, Led Zeppelin, Benjamin Britten, Van Morrison, even hints of flamenco — and it is one of the most distinctive debut records ever made. The influences don’t cancel each other out. They create a triangulation. When you’re pulling from enough different sources, the result can’t be mistaken for any single one of them.

This is actually a practical technique. The songwriter who sounds derivative is usually the one who has one dominant influence — who absorbed a single artist so deeply that everything they write sounds like a tribute act. The songwriter who sounds original has usually eaten widely. Jazz and country and hip-hop and folk and classical. Poets and novelists as well as lyricists. Paintings, films, conversations overheard on trains. The more varied the inputs, the harder it becomes for any single one to dominate the output.

Kleon talks about the difference between “good theft” and “bad theft” — honoring versus plagiarising, transforming versus merely copying, combining versus imitating. In songwriting terms, bad theft is the songwriter who writes a song that could be mistaken for one of their heroes’ songs. Good theft is the songwriter who takes something from a hero, something from an enemy, something from a poet dead two centuries, and produces something that could only have come from that particular collision.

Building Your Own Lineage

There’s a practice that’s worth taking seriously, which is the deliberate construction of your own creative genealogy. Not just knowing who you like, but understanding the chain of influence — who influenced your influences, what those people were reacting against, where the music came from before it became the thing you love.

If you write indie rock and you love The National, do you know how much of Matt Berninger’s lyrical approach comes from Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson — prose writers, not songwriters? Do you know how much the guitar textures owe to post-rock, and what the post-rock artists themselves were taking from minimalist classical composers? If you follow the chain far enough, you end up somewhere completely unexpected, and that unexpected somewhere is material you can actually use.

The songwriter who only listens to music is working with a limited palette. Language has rhythms that music doesn’t. Visual art has structural principles that translate across disciplines in strange and productive ways. Architecture thinks about space and tension and resolution in ways that are directly applicable to song form. The more you steal from outside music, the less your music will sound like it was made by someone trying to write a song and more like it was made by a person with a life.

This is what “finding your voice” actually means. Not arriving at a destination, not one day waking up original. It means accumulating enough varied influences that your particular combination of them becomes unrepeatable by anyone else. Your fingerprint is the sum of everything you’ve touched.

The Song That Could Only Be Yours

There’s a test worth applying to everything you write. Would someone hear this and think immediately of someone else? If the answer is yes, ask yourself whether that’s because you’ve borrowed too narrowly — whether you’re working from one source when you should be working from ten. And then ask whether the borrowing has been transformed, whether it’s passed through enough of your own experience and intelligence and obsession to have become something that carries your mark.

The goal isn’t originality in the sense of arriving at something that has never existed — that’s a fantasy, and chasing it produces either paralysis or pretension. The goal is specificity. A song that sounds like it came from a particular human life, a particular set of concerns, a particular way of hearing the world. Influence is the raw material. Transformation is the work. And the test at the end is simply whether the thing you made could have been made by anyone other than you.

If it couldn’t, you’ve done it. The theft was clean.

Explore Resonillator’s songwriting tools to start building — and transforming — your own musical ideas.