The similarity was observed quickly enough:
“There’s a Pixies vibe in ‘Actually Romantic’, with a riff reminiscent of ‘Where Is My Mind?’” wrote Stylist.
Pitchfork referred to the track as “the Kidz Bop version of the Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind?’,” a phrase that spread quickly across social media, including Pitchfork’s own X post.
Defensible and to be expected. Here’s The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”
Here’s Taylor Swift’s “Actually Romantic.”
Stripped down, Actually Romantic turns on this short looping chord progression: E – C♯m – G♯ – A.
It’s that third chord in the sequence, the G-sharp major in the key of E — that’ll get you flagged. It’s not diatonic; it’s not “of the key;” it’s not super duper available; it’s not commonly employed that way, but you did it anyway. As did the Pixies. And it’s conspicuous, that a chromatic-mediant color. Mediants are the name given to the chords built on the notes an interval of a third in either direction from tonic and chromatic mediants… yeah, nobody cares. I know that.
Let’s call it “a major III thing you can do.” The major III chord is bright, unexpected, and instantly recognizable to anyone who knows Where Is My Mind? And it has a tendency to get you sued because, although it’s becoming pretty well established, it’s yet the stuff of that Axis of Awesome — same four chords in a hundred songs bit.
But you have heard the major III thing before. And it’s been known to cause a stir before! Here’s Creep, Get Free, and The Air That I Breathe from Loudwire.
It’s the same harmonic device that catches your ear in all of those. Radiohead’s chords (I think it’s in G but I transposed into E major for reasons) are E – G♯ – A – Am, and you can see in the chart below, as in the Pixies and Taylor Swift progressions, the major III chord G# leads to A — the same harmonic motion. It’s relatively conspicuous, yes, but it’s out there. Everclear’s “I Will Buy You a New Life,” shares that same harmonic motion. In other words, they’re all cousins in the same harmonic family.
| Song | Key (transposed to E) | Progression |
|---|---|---|
| Actually Romantic (Taylor Swift) | E | E – C♯m – G♯ – A |
| Where Is My Mind? (Pixies) | E | E – C♯m – G♯ – A |
| Creep (Radiohead) | E | E – G♯ – A – Am |
| The Air That I Breathe (The Hollies) | E | E – G♯ – A – Am |
| Get Free (Lana Del Rey) | E | E – G♯m – A – Am |
| I Will Buy You a New Life (Everclear)(chorus) | E | E – G♯ – C#m – A |
| Axis of Awesome | E | E – B – C♯m – A |
Yep, the Axis of Awesome ain’t so far to walk either. This is why chord progressions in popular music aren’t very protectable.
But there are courts and then there are courts of public opinion. In my view, and to a sometimes confounding extent, in the eyes of the law, both count.
I’m sure there’s more out there but what I’ve seen focuses on these:
It’s not really in the law that chords aren’t protectable. A long enough progression has to be! But it’s a practical matter. Pop song progressions are usually two or four bars long; pretty short; a handful of chords you’ve heard before. They become “scenes à faire,” or “building blocks” — stock progressions that, if protected, would halt songwriting as we know it. And more generally courts have consistently rejected infringement claims built on short, common sequences. The Ninth Circuit’s reversal in Katy Perry v. Flame (“Dark Horse”) determined that Flame’s eight-note ostinato wasn’t protectable. The Sheeran decisions on both Shape of You and Thinking Out Loud reaffirmed that harmonic building blocks remain free for all. Their familarity is a lot of their strength and value. We settle into Taylor’s repeating four chords, get the vibe, and pay more attention to her snarky lyrics.
The Pixies progression isn’t generic, and that’s why we’re having this discussion. But it isn’t owned either. It’s one of a handful of modern pop colors that emerged post-Hollies and post-Creep; unusual enough to feel specific, and a credit to those songwriters for stretching a little, but common enough to be safely reused.
“Although I know my song wasn’t inspired by Creep, Radiohead feel it was and want 100% of the publishing — I offered up to 40 over the last few months but they will only accept 100. Their lawyers have been relentless so we will deal with it in court.” — @LanaDelRey
We don’t get to know what happened here. Warner/Chappell quickly denied any lawsuit or 100 percent demand; no credits changed; no case was filed. Maybe they settled. I kinda imagine Radiohead might’ve not been behind it in the first place, and called it off. They could afford to shrug; but on the other hand consistent enforcement underpins IP. Vigilance is at least a part of stewardship.
Meanwhile, it is notable that Radiohead themselves share “Creep” with Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood of The Hollies, who received co-writing credit and royalties after their publisher noted the similarity to “The Air That I Breathe.” Irony?
If I really had to swat this away, I might start by pointing out that not all elements in music are equally dispositive of copying. There are no interesting similarities in either the lyrics nor the melodies in these two songs. And the harmonic color isn’t new. In Schumann’s Träumerei, he goes from F to A before falling to Dm. (I should transpose that as I did above. It would be E-G#-C#m as in Everclear’s song.) It’s not exactly what the Pixies or Radiohead or Swift do; the G# is more obviously the secondary dominant targeting C#m, but coming from tonic, it’s the same very bright, slightly dislocating move. I might refer to Schumann and all those first to mind other tracks here as “prior art.” In other words, while the progression isn’t a common one, the Pixies didn’t make that element up out of nothing. Schumann employed it about two centuries ago. Demi Lovato used the same progression in “29.” If I sit for ten minutes, I bet I’ll find ten more.
The “chromatic mediant,” as I called it earlier, is just one note different from the not at all conspicuous “mediant” that would’ve been G#m. That one pitch shift, from G to G# in the third of this chord, is why we’re here.
It’s also manual! Recall that I transposed some of these examples to facilitate apples-to-apples comparisons. Music is mostly relative, and in my analyses, I usually transpose all the relevant material into the same key in the first few steps. Key matters hardly at all. We turn a blind ear to it. It would be silly, however, to turn a blind eye. Taylor’s song is actually in the same key as the Pixies! Is that a zero? Of course not; it’s information, and it’s gotta be at least minimally incriminating, right? Maybe, but it’s also arguably exculpatory. All of these songs came out of guitar-playing songwriters. It’s tactile. The difference between a major and minor form is literally lifting one finger inside the same “barre chord” position, same fret, same geometry. It plausibly explains why any or all of these guitar-playing songwriters’ hands found major-III. Don’t imagine a leap up or down the neck and some kool guitaristic dexterity and selection; imagine instead the hand doesn’t move, same fret, middle finger either down, or up in the air on G string. (had to do that.)
So, bottom line: You’ve heard the rationale, “There are only 12 notes?” I don’t use that one gladly. But to the extent that it’s meaningful, chords are in the same boat. Chord options may be ultimately numerous, but short chord progressions pleasing to popular music audience ears are quite few, so “new-ish but acceptable” ones are a rare development. When one catches on, it circulates a bit. This major-III color has been circulating since the Hollies, Radiohead, Everclear, and the Pixies all experimented with it. Swift’s Actually Romantic just joins the lineage.
Addendum: Because I’m being asked about two other comparisons. I really can’t be bothered with the Wood v. The Jackson 5’s I Want You Back thing. That’s far sillier than this one. It ain’t sampled, it ain’t very similar. It ain’t interesting. A little more understanding for the “The Life of a Showgirl” v. Jonas Brothers “Cool,” idea. Different from the one above. The chords are dissimilar in plenty of ways. Cool is a very standard thing, it’s G F C G, a mixolydian chain of subdominants like you hear in Sweet Home Alabama, and Sympathy for the Devil, and the end of Hey Jude with the “Na-na-na Nah’s, and Chest Fever. Taylor’s — let me throw that on and just wing this… same tempo and here again, same key, so if you have good tonal orientation — say, you’re like my daughter who sings songs in the original key without any reference — you might quickly pick up on that too, but as we mentioned earlier, key is not valued heavily when I consider originality or copying. Cool would be Cool in any key, and so would Showgirl. But Taylor’s progression is far more involved. G-G-Am-F-G-C2/E-F-C. That C2/E could be called something else. No big. Anyway, we have F major in a G tonality, and while it’s not gonna stick out like the Creep-y III chord, it stands out a bit. Add to that the guitar and voice instrumentation. And the melodies are, well, for a couple of measures, actually pretty similar with those blue chip notes at the ends of the phrases both moving from B to C. I definitely do understand why this is being discussed. But don’t get all worked up when I say, all of those less important in-between notes, they’re meanderings that employ just Do-Re-and Mi to accomodate their respective completely unrelated lyrics and the more important notes, that B moving to C where Taylor ends kitty and witty, and Cool does what it does, those are THE most default most obviously available landing spots for Taylor’s chords for sure, and no worse than tied in those terms with one other note as the most obvious election for Cool’s very different chord. And then they become far more different from each other. I wouldn’t dream of arguing that’s unlawful appropriation. The briefly similar melody is not all that similar relative to how very available it is. I’d definitely argue Taylor doesn’t need to be thinking about or even familiar with Cool to write Showgirl, and that, meanwhile, even if she had heard Cool on the way home that day, she still wrote something substantially different from it.
Questions welcome. Find me on X.
