Miley Cyrus has been hit with a new lawsuit alleging she and her fellow songwriters copied portions of a Bruno Mars single when they wrote her Grammy-winning banger “Flowers.”
In a new lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Los Angeles, a company called Tempo Music Investments claimed “Flowers” includes unauthorized “exploitation” of several elements of Mars’ 2013 Hot 100-charting song “When I Was Your Man.” The suit also names Sony Music Publishing, Apple, Target, Walmart, and several other companies as defendants accused of distributing “Flowers.”
Tempo Music said that it owns a portion of U.S. copyrights to “When I Was Your Man” after acquiring it from Philip Lawrence, who co-wrote the song along with Mars, Ari Levine, and Andrew Wyatt. Mars is not named as a plaintiff in the suit.
“Any fan of Bruno Mars’ ‘When I Was Your Man’ knows that Miley Cyrus’ ‘Flowers’ did not achieve all of that success on its own. ‘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,” the lawsuit obtained by Rolling Stone claimed.
“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,’” the complaint, which names Cyrus’ fellow songwriters Gregory Hein and Michael Pollack as co-defendants, continued. “With ‘Flowers,’ Cyrus, Hein, and Pollack have created a derivative work of ‘When I Was Your Man’ without authorization.”
Reps for Cyrus did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
In February, Cyrus won her first Grammy for “Flowers,” a track from her eighth album Endless Summer Vacation. The hit song, which held its Number One spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks, was written after of her divorce from actor Liam Hemsworth and was largely seen as a declaration of independence.
Tempo Music is seeking damages in an amount to be determined at trial; it is also demanding a court order prohibiting Cyrus and the other defendants from reproducing, distributing, or publicly performing “Flowers.”