song: Million Years Ago
artist: Adele
album: 25 (2015)
writers: Adele Adkins & Greg Kurstin

This beautiful guitar ballad is great for beginner guitar players. The guitar chords interplay beautifully and is a great study in arrangement. Enjoy!

This song has had a tumultuous legal decade which deserves a few educated remarks: An accusation arose in 2015 among fans of Ahmet Kaya that Adele’s chorus section plagiarized “Acılara Tutunmak”, released in 1985, although this was not taken to court. As a music educator, I want to point out that the chord progression and the appertaining melody sequence in question are standard compositional patterns of Western music history. To take another contemporary example, similar chords and melody are also found in the theme from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical “The Phantom of the Opera”, released in 1986.
Another accusation of plagiarism, this one taken to court, came in 2021 from composer Toninho Geraes who composed “Mulheres”, recorded by Martinho da Vila in 1995. The legal claim pointed to the similarity of the two compositions’ introduction and version sections (compare the first 39 seconds of the two). This claim of plagiarism eventually won in court in 2024. Again, I want to point out that the chords and melody in the verse section are also similar to “Yesterday, When I Was Young”, written by Charles Aznavour in 1973 and recorded, most famously, by Glen Campbell in 1974. The first verse of Adele’s lyrics ends on the line «When I was young» and is an explicit citation of this.
By making such comparisons, I simply want to illustrate the fact that Western music history has established certain compositional patterns, and when composers deploy these, their compositions are likely to sound similar. This fact should makes us question the commonplace assumption that mainstream compositions like these are ‘original enough’ to deserve compositional copyright (regardless of one’s view of copyright on compositions in general). By illustrating this, however, I do not want venture any legal opinion. Many other kinds of fact should be taken into legal consideration as well – most importantly, facts about what songs the composers knew, what intentions they had, etc. – none of which have much to do with music theory and history.