By Larry Neumeister
NEW YORK (AP) --A songwriting team sued country singer Carrie Underwood, the NFL and NBC Wednesday, saying they stole a song and "slightly modified" it to introduce "Sunday Night Football" to viewers last season.
The lawsuit in Manhattan federal court noted that Underwood's "Game On" even carried the same title as the song singer Heidi Merrill of Newport Beach, California, put on an internet music video two years ago.
The lawsuit sought unspecified damages, saying the copyright was violated on the song that had been pitched to Underwood's representatives in 2017.
The NFL and NBCUniversal Media LLC declined comment. Carrie Underwood's representatives did not immediately comment.
The plaintiffs are a songwriting team consisting of four individuals, including Merrill, from California, Tennessee and Sweden.
The lawsuit said Merrill assembled the group to create the song in 2016 as a follow to her Nebraska-themed football anthem "Cornhusker Strong."
It said they marketed the song, aiming to get it licensed for use in television broadcasts of sporting events.
Merrill pitched the song to Underwood's producer in August 2017 during a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, where Underwood lives, the lawsuit said.
It said the producer referred Merrill to his assistant, who told her in an email in October 2017: "I'm sorry, we're going to have to pass."
The lawsuit claimed that the song that introduced 17 NFL Sunday night games through the season beginning in September 2018 "is substantially — even strikingly — similar, if not identical," to the song Underwood's team had rejected.
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More