Thank you for the update and word.

Thank you for the clarification and I apologize for any misunderstanding on my part. I agree with you that there is a very likely influence and that God is in control of what happened. I believe, that whether Pillar realizes it or not, that God used them to develop a Christian message, a call to evangelism, that is based on an older, very popular song. It’s wonderful!

John

Just my 2-cents.

I must strongly disagree with your statement that “there is no denying that this was intentional.” Such assertions cannot be made, but only speculated. Also, many factors would raise much doubt that it is intentional. Such as:

- The very basic beat and meter used
- The amount of time between the recording of Skid Row’s song and Pillar’s (about twenty years), making it possible the authors were unaware of the older song
- The limited number of beats/meters that are both pleasant to hear and fit within a 2-beat based measure (including 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 beats)
- The vast differences in the verses in both melody, tone, meter, etc.
- The message is quite different
- The basis of both songs (basic blues and 4/4 music)

There’s more, but I think the point is clear. While there are strong similarities and definite commonalities, that absolutely does not mean that Pillar intentionally copied a song. Instead, they may have had a beat in their head, played something that fit it that sounded good, and wrote a song around it.

If we want to delve into songs that are copies of one another, one need not look much further than much country and Southern Gospel music. A few years ago I listened to a special on television that honored the acclaimed musical creativity of a renowned Southern Gospel song writer. As I listened to each song, I noticed that over half were the same melody (with a note or two changed, often only by the ending note going lower instead of going higher), the same meter, the same formula of verse/chorus/bridge, etc. I concluded that the song writer’s acclaimed creativity was limited to about four or five actual songs, just change the lyrics. Many other songs not written by this person also use the same or very similar melody, beat, meter, structure, etc.

Is it intentional song stealing or song copying? Maybe, maybe not. It may be that the song writers are remaining within the bounds of what ‘works’ in that musical genre. The same with Pillar: they may have simply composed a song within the bounds of what ‘works’ within their genre (e.g., you won’t hear a hard rock band playing much polka music or using many 3/4 beats).

Therefore, while commonalities and similarities may exists between two songs (and almost anything deemed melodic will likely have been used before), one cannot say that there was any intentionality to the common threads.