Lizzy McAlpine Accidentally Channeled Nick Drake on Her New Album

There's a particular kind of creative vertigo that hits when you realize the song you thought you wrote already exists — and Lizzy McAlpine felt it hard while recording her new album Angel. The 26-year-old singer-songwriter is opening up about the moment she discovered a striking resemblance between one of her new tracks and a Nick Drake classic, and the surprisingly beautiful way it all resolved.

The Moment the Penny Dropped

McAlpine wrote a track called "A Car Wash And A New Pair Of Pants" while deep in a Pink Moon-heavy listening phase, but hadn't yet made her way through Drake's full catalog. According to Stereogum, she recounted the story on the Switched On Pop podcast — explaining that a friend heard the song and immediately flagged it. "Oh, this sounds like a Nick Drake song," he told her, sending her into an immediate spiral of "Oh, God, which one?"

The answer turned out to be "One Of These Things First" from Drake's 1971 record Bryter Layter — an album she hadn't actually listened to yet. The key was the same. The intro chord progression matched. And yet McAlpine swears she had never heard the track before sitting down to write her own.

Channeling a Legend (By Accident)

What makes this story compelling isn't the overlap itself — musical coincidences happen constantly, and the current climate around plagiarism allegations makes artists understandably anxious about them. What stands out is McAlpine's raw honesty about the whole thing. "I never heard that song before I wrote it," she said. "And so it felt like I channeled something."

That instinct — that creative osmosis where an artist absorbs the ghost of an influence without consciously knowing it — is one of the stranger, more poetic realities of making music. You marinate in an artist's world long enough, and their harmonic logic seeps into your own hands.

Writing to the Estate

Rather than quietly bury the track or rework it beyond recognition, McAlpine and her label took the more dignified road. Her label flagged the similarity as "a little too close," and McAlpine took it upon herself to write a personal letter to Nick Drake's estate. It wasn't a legal formality — it was a genuine declaration of admiration. "I am so inspired by Nick Drake," she wrote. "I think he was one of the greats."

The estate responded in kind, granting permission and allowing her to credit Drake on the song. Nick Drake's name now sits next to hers in the liner notes of Angel — something McAlpine called "so crazy," with the kind of disbelief that's equal parts joy and awe.

Plagiarism, Influence, and the Line Between Them

The music world has been especially attuned to these questions lately, with multiple ripoff allegations swirling around various artists and the debate over where genuine influence ends and imitation begins heating up across the industry. For McAlpine, the outcome is actually a kind of dream scenario — accidentally writing your way into a co-credit with a folk legend you adore.

Nick Drake may have died in 1974, largely unrecognized in his own time, but his fingerprints keep showing up in the work of artists who never shared a stage with him. That's its own kind of legacy — haunting new music from across five decades. And now, on Angel, that quiet ghost has a formal credit to his name.

The whole episode is a reminder that influence in music is rarely clean or linear. Whether you're navigating the legal complexities that can follow artistic disputes or simply trying to honor the artists who shaped you, the most honest path tends to be the most interesting one. Lizzy McAlpine chose honesty — and ended up sharing a byline with one of folk music's most enduring voices.

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