According to The Hollywood Reporter, Robin Thicke admitted to lying about writing his hit “Blurred Lines.”
In a court deposition obtained by The Hollywood Reporter for the lawsuit with Marvin Gaye’s family for allegedly ripping off the late singer’s classic called “Got to Give It Up”, the R&B star admitted he lied about writing the controversial track and said that collaborator Pharrell Williams wrote most of the song on his own.
Thicke said he lied about his involvement in the songwriting process out of jealousy. “After making six albums that I wrote and produced myself, the biggest hit of my career was written and produced by someone else and I was jealous and I wanted some of the credit,” he said. “I tried to take credit for it later because [Pharrell] wrote the whole thing pretty much by himself and I was envious of that.”
The 37-year-old musician went on saying that he was present at the studio when he, Pharrell and T.I. recorded the song. “I was present. Obviously, I sang it. I had to be there,” he said.
“I was high on Vicodin and alcohol when I showed up at the studio. So my recollection is when we made the song, I thought I wanted to be more involved than I actually was by the time, nine months later, it became a huge hit and I wanted credit. So I started kind of convincing myself that I was a little more part of it than I was and I – because I didn’t want him – I wanted some credit for this big hit. But the reality is, is that Pharrell had the beat and he wrote almost every single part of the song,” he explained.
Pharrell appeared to agree with Thicke in his deposition, saying, “This is what happens every day in our industry. You know, people are made to look like they have much more authorship in the situation than they actually do. So that’s where the embellishment comes in.”
However, he gave Thicke so much credit (Thicke receives about 18-22 percent of publishing royalties) because he believed it’s Thicke’s voice that holds the song together. “It’s the white man singing soulfully and we, unfortunately, in this country don’t get enough… we don’t get to hear that as often, so we get excited by it when the mainstream gives that a shot,” he added.
Sources: New York Post, The Hollywood Reporter, Centric
