Stella Lefty is speed-running the nepo baby arc. If you haven’t heard of Stella, you can be forgiven. The 24-year-old country singer appeared seemingly out of nowhere as a fully formed artist who dropped a Billboard top 20 hit that also landed her a national tour. Of course, “nowhere,” in this case, is actually the home of Groupon founder and health technology firm Tempus AI CEO Eric Lefkofsky, and that top 20 hit bears a striking resemblance to someone else’s work.
Lefty’s “Boston” has racked up nearly 180 million streams on Spotify at the time of publication and has been a massive hit on TikTok, where Lefty’s bootleg Taylor Swift vibes give tweens a knockoff option to serve as the soundtrack to their posts. But the song was even more successful when Noah Kahan called it “Stick Season.”
While Kahan’s folksy style has a timeless sound to it, the song is actually only four years old and has nearly two billion streams of its own. So the decision to hijack the chorus, as it appears Lefty has done with “Boston,” is pretty bold. This isn’t stealing some earworm-y hook from a song lost to time. Pick a random cafe or like, any Walgreens and hang out for an hour and you’re gonna hear “Stick Season.”
Lefty, or someone on her team, at least seemed aware of the similarities, seeing as they gave Kahan a songwriting credit on the official release of “Boston.” But, in an interview with Vanity Fair, Lefty is less interested in sharing the credit. “When I was writing the song, I wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan,” Lefty told the publication. “I was literally thinking about nothing at all.”
Now, you might think that “Boston” is a nothing of a song and it’d make sense if she was thinking about nothing while writing it. But there is this itty bitty problem for Lefty’s defense of “head empty,” which is that there is post after post after post of her singing “Stick Season” on her TikTok. Posts that she recorded and uploaded. Unique videos of her performing the exact same song that she says she absolutely was not thinking about, over and over, from 2022 to 2024.
Why did she have to sing it this many times pic.twitter.com/v0sc8EAFF3
— Taylor with a big yellow headdress (@MITSKlSUS) August 27, 2026
“I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, so I’m like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good,” she told Vanity Fair, which is almost refreshing in its shamelessness. She comes from money—like, so much money—so it’s not like she needs the Spotify checks. All she really wants is the fame, and now she’s got that.
Besides, you can’t expect Lefty to come up with original songs when, according to an interview she gave to Country Limits, she spends all of her free time thinking about what to post. “I am spending hours and hours and hours on my phone posting, thinking about what to post. There’s just so much of that goes into that alone in my brain,” she said like a true poster.
Lefty’s transparency is almost welcome in a world where the descendants of the tech oligarchs are out here wreaking havoc for the rest of us. Bill Gates’ daughter, Pheobe, recently caught flak for her digital shopping assistant allegedly engaging in a cookie stuffing scheme that could potentially lead to criminal charges. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s kid David has gotten in trouble for copyright matters in the past, and is now basically in charge of damn near half of everything that you see on a silver screen.
Somehow, the most well-adjusted billionaire offspring seems to be one of Elon Musk’s, seeing as Vivian appears chill as hell despite her dad putting a public target on her back. But hey, if you take enough shots, you gotta hit on one of them.
