Which is to say, if you turned the radio on halfway through you wouldn’t mistake it for Elton John. It may use a well-known song as a jumping-off point, but once Mars hits the chorus the song becomes distinct enough that you can tell the difference. However, like Locked Out Of Heaven, When I Was Your Man does eventually morph into its own thing. The melody, the chord changes, the pace, the arrangement – all of these elements together are all too close to the original for it to be a simple coincidence. One of those artists is Bruno Mars, and the song in question is When I Was Your Man.Īside from a few tiny changes in rhythm and the final few notes of the line, the verses to Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word and When I Was Your Man are eerily similar. So it’s inevitable that, occasionally, an artist will write a song that sounds almost exactly like an Elton John original. There are, after all, only a finite number of notes to use. Given that he’s written and recorded 33 studio albums (as well as many more songs for movies, musicals and days of national mourning) you could reasonably argue that Elton John has taken up more than his fair share of melodies. The actual melody-stealing started with Bruno’s next single. Locked Out Of Heaven merely provides a whistlestop tour of the Police’s biggest hits, all distilled into three and a bit minutes. In fairness to Bruno Mars though, there is no real plagiarism here. Then, just before the chorus, we have a bridge where the laid-back reggae-lite rhythm turns into straight rock beat while the vocalist sings a repeated lyrical refrain.įinally, we hit the chorus which features a long sustained chord on a jazz organ or a synth keyboard of some description, which underpins the rest of the band as they chug and thrash out faster notes ( So Lonely, Message In A Bottle etc) This is then followed by a verse in which the vocalist (Sting/Mars) yelps out a melody that sits towards the top-end of their range – the sort of ball-tightening notes that regular civilians usually need a few beers before attempting at karaoke. Locked Out Of Heaven pretty closely copies the time-honoured pattern of most of The Police’s most-recognisable songs.įirst we have the reggae-lite syncopated guitar stroke dominating the intro – the sharp, stabby chk-chk-chk-chk sound that appears in Roxanne, Can’t Stand Losing You, Walking On The Moon etc. While the intro of Locked Out Of Heaven is most likely to put a listener in mind of Roxanne (track one of The Police’s Greatest Hits album), the song as a whole also owes a definite debt to Can’t Stand Losing You (track two of Greatest Hits) – as well as little nods to So Lonely (track three) and Message In A Bottle (track four). How did it get this bad? Let’s take a quick look at the history of counterfeiting in the Mars discography. In fact, he’s become so addicted to ripping songs off, he can’t seem to kick the habit. It dates right back to his second single, Grenade, where the opening piano refrain is note-for-note the same as Coldplay’s Clocks (transposed up a third…) Mars is something of a melodic magpie, having consistent form with nicking other people’s riffs. Not just in the sense that it’s all been done before, more in the sense that it has actually all been done before. However, there’s something a little familiar about it all. Uptown Funk, 24K Magic, his latest single Finesse (Remix) have all been critical and commercial successes – and now that MJ and Prince are both gone, there’s definitely a vacancy for an all-singing, all-dancing, singer-producer-dancer funkmaster type. Like Daniel Bedingfield before him, Mars would bounce from style to style, from single to single (the arena pop of Just The Way You Are the Jason Mraz stoner beach vibe of The Lazy Song the classic piano ballad sound of When I Was Your Man).īut since the release of Treasure – from his second album, Unorthadox Jukebox – he seems to have settled on a funk sound. Early in his career, Bruno Mars was known to be a bit of a genre-hopper.
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