It’s been exactly 1 week since Taylor Swift released “The Life of a Showgirl” and she’s been facing some major criticism that many of her new songs sound a little too much like some older classics. A video has been making the rounds that compare Taylor’s tunes to the ones they feel like she could have been influenced by or copied all together.

But Charlie Puth is coming to her defense and says that people need to stop demonizing artists for these types of things and explaining how songwriting actually works. He says “There’s only 12 notes in a scale. So, when you’re writing a new song, there are bound to be similarities to an old song.” He goes on to explain that similarities between two melodies only become full-scale interpolation when they reach five consecutive identical notes. Below that mark, he says a string of the same notes is just a common musical tool doesn’t need to be credited or licensed. You can listen to his explanation here: