TORONTO — Robin Thicke said he had very little to do with creating his hit song “Blurred Lines” and was under the influence of drugs and alcohol when Pharrell Williams wrote it.
“I was high on Vicodin and alcohol when I showed up at the studio,” Thicke said during a deposition for a lawsuit brought against he and others by the estate of Marvin Gaye.
Gaye’s family alleges “Blurred Lines” is a rip-off of his 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up.”
Thicke testified at the deposition that Williams “had the beat and he wrote almost every single part of the song.”
In an interview with GQ magazine published in May 2013, Thicke said: “Pharrell and I were in the studio and I told him that one of my favorite songs of all time was Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up.’ I was like, ‘Damn, we should make something like that, something with that groove.’ Then he started playing a little something and we literally wrote the song in about a half hour and recorded it.”
READ MORE: Pharrell Williams talks about battle over “Blurred Lines”
Under oath, though, Thicke said he wanted to take credit for the success of the song. “I started kind of convincing myself that I was a little more part of it than I was,” he told lawyers.
He said he took credit for the song in interviews because he “thought it would help sell records.”
Thicke added that he didn’t recall much of what he told reporters because he had a drug and alcohol problem and “didn’t do a sober interview.”
Williams, in his deposition, backed up Thicke’s claims. “People are made to look like they have much more authorship in the situation than they actually do,” he said. “So that’s where the embellishment comes in.”
Asked point blank whose lyrics are in “Blurred Lines,” Williams replied: “Mine.”
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