A new lawsuit alleges that Olivia Dean’s song “I’ve Seen It,” from her hit album, The art of lovingstole Bill Wither’s iconic track “Just The Two of Us”.
Mattie Music Group, the publisher of Wither’s music catalog, claims in court documents filed Thursday in California that the similarities between Dean’s 2025 song and Wither’s 1981 hit are “obvious and inescapable.”
“The number, character, and arrangement of the shared musical elements are so striking as to support an interference that the similarities do not result from coincidence, independent creation, or reliance on common musical elements,” the complaint states, according to court documents obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.
Mattie Music Group claims it first heard “I’ve Seen It” in August 2026 and listened to the song “several times” before hiring a musicologist, Alexander Stewart, Ph.D., to perform a “musicological analysis and comparison” of the two songs. It was determined that Dean’s song “substantially copied” Wither’s “Just the Two of Us” and stole its “distinctly protectable melody,” the lawsuit states.
The publisher claims it attempted to contact the defendants — listed as Capitol Records, Universal Music Group, Sony Publishing and Kobalt Music Publishing America, Inc. — in August, but they “continued to reproduce, distribute, license, publicly perform and commercially exploit” Dean’s song.
Dean and his co-writers, Bastian Langebaek and Max Wolfgang, are not named as defendants. The filing alleges that the trio “had a reasonable opportunity to encounter” Withers’ song before writing “I’ve Seen It.”
Written by Withers, Ralph MacDonald and William Salter, “Just the Two of Us” was a commercial success when it hit the airwaves in the early 1980s. The song reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and won a Grammy for Best R&B Song. Withers died at the age of 81, almost 40 years later, in March 2020.
Mattie Music Group is seeking damages to be decided at trial.
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