In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Eric Church says he was once roped into a Taylor Swift copyright lawsuit after the superstar mentioned his song during a deposition.
Back in 2017, Swift was sued by the songwriters behind 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play” for using the lyrics “players gonna play, haters gonna hate” in her hit “Shake It Off.” The lawsuit sparked a years-long legal battle that was ultimately dismissed in late 2022. But during her deposition months earlier, Swift claimed she first knew of the lyric from Church’s song “The Outsiders.”
“In her deposition, when [talking about the line] ‘players gonna play, haters gonna hate,’ she says, ‘The first time I heard that phrase was in Eric Church’s song ‘The Outsiders,”” Church said in the Rolling Stone Interview. “She was saying she never heard it on the [original song], which is what they were suing her for. And two weeks later, I got served by the people that were suing her!”
Specifically, Swift had said she had “heard the phrases ‘players gonna play’ and ‘haters gonna hate’ uttered countless times to express the idea that one should shrug off negativity,” and had referred to the Church track.
“I sent her a text, and she responded,” Church recounted. “I was like, ‘Hey, thanks. Next time, let’s just skip that part?’ And she sent me a text: ‘I’m sorry. It’s the truth though. That’s when I first heard that phrase.’ It’s since been settled. But I was like, ‘How did this even happen?’”
Swift and the two songwriters who accused her of copyright infringement on “Shake It Off” agreed to dismiss the lawsuit a month before it was set to head to trial in December 2022. The filings did not include any reason for the agreement to dismiss the case, but it started in 2017 after Sean Hall and Nathan Butleer sued Swift in 2017 for allegedly taking the line from “Playas Gon’ Play.”
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Last week, Swift successfully gained control of her recorded music catalog six years after her old label, Big Machine Label Group, sold it to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings. Church, meanwhile, is currently performing around Nashville during CMA Fest. On Thursday, he made a surprise appearance at Spotify House, performing hits like “Springsteen” and supporting his latest album, Evangeline vs. the Machine.
