Truth may hurt in writing spat over Lizzo’s hit
For millions of listeners, Lizzo’s hit “Truth Hurts” has been more than just the No. 1 song in the country, the position it held on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for six weeks this summer and fall.
An ebullient anthem of empowerment, the song has thoroughly penetrated pop culture and has also introduced Lizzo as a new kind of star: an outspoken, body-positive woman of color, who is expected to be a major contender at next year’s Grammy Awards.
But who wrote the song? That question has been quietly in dispute for months. The song’s official credits list Lizzo, whose real name is Melissa Jefferson; Ricky Reed, her primary producer; Tele, another producer; and Jesse Saint John. But a pair of songwriting brothers, Justin and Jeremiah Raisen, say they were involved in an early writing session with Lizzo that adapted a tweet into the song’s signature lyric — “I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100 percent that b----” — and were denied credit.
Cynthia Arato, a lawyer for Lizzo, strongly denied the Raisens’ claim.
“The Raisens are not writers of ‘Truth Hurts,’ ” Arato said in a statement. “They did not collaborate with Lizzo or anyone else to create this song, and they did not help write any of the material that they now seek to profit from, which is why they expressly renounced any claim to the work, in writing, months ago.”
According to the Raisen brothers, they held a joint songwriting session in April 2017 with Lizzo and two other writers, Saint John and Yves Rothman.
While the five of them worked on a song called “Healthy,” the brothers said, Saint John pulled up a meme on his phone based on a tweet that read: “I did a DNA test and found out I’m 100 percent that b - - -.” They all laughed, and Jeremiah said that he suggested including the lyric in the song.
Lizzo sang it almost identically to the way those words appear in “Truth Hurts,” as demonstrated in a recording from the session that the brothers later posted on Instagram. Jeremiah also said he helped write the melody for “Healthy,” including the “DNA test” line.
In another complication, the woman who wrote the tweet, British singer Mina Lioness, has complained bitterly that she, too, deserves credit.
Five months after that session, “Truth Hurts” was released, and the Raisens said they were surprised.
“There was a bittersweet emotion, because deep in our hearts we know that we were a part of this song,” Jeremiah Raisen said. “We should feel validated but we’re not.”
The Raisens are seeking 5 percent each of the songwriting royalties from “Truth Hurts.”
The Raisens also commissioned an opinion from a musicologist, who concluded that “Truth Hurts” has “some strikingly similar lyric and musical elements to those in ‘Healthy,’ ” and that Lizzo’s hit “would not exist in its present form without the existence of and the borrowing from ‘Healthy.’ ”
After six weeks at No. 1, “Truth Hurts” finally fell to second place on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart Monday.