The Black Keys Fan Lounge Forum

I know we all have talked about the similarities of TBK songs in other musician's work. I found this video that talks about what many bands, including TBK, have done with other musician's work.

As I'm learning from all the reading I've been doing on blues music of late, this can all be traced even further back. Blues artists often lifted melodies and lyrical phrases from each other. For instance, you can find the phrase "I asked him/her for water, he/she brought me gasoline" in many blues songs down the line. Robert Johnson (who I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the section in that video about Led Zeppelin's "The Lemon Song") sometimes borrowed from three or four other songs to create his own songs. And many of the early blues artists would write their own arrangements of other artists' songs and call it "original".

On paper there is a finite (though very large) number of combinations of notes and rhythms that can be made musically. Given that plus the existence of musical tropes like the 12-bar blues and it's not surprising you hear a lot of repetition. And yet there is still so much originality out there..