Brow Beat

Robin Thicke’s Bizarre “Blurred Lines” Deposition Is Both Unflattering and Convenient

Robin Thicke is not having a good year.

Photo by ROBIN VAN LONKHUIJSEN/AFP/Getty Images

2014 has not been good to Robin Thicke. In May, he began his “full-blown stalker” apology tour for estranged wife Paula Patton with a Billboard Music Awards performance of “Get Her Back,” the lead single from his album Paula, which tanked over the summer. In the midst of that romantic drama, Thicke has also been involved in an ongoing legal battle with the Marvin Gaye estate, led by Gaye’s children, who allege that his 2013 Song of the SummerBlurred Lines” rips off Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up.”

Today, the Hollywood Reporter published the full transcript from Thicke’s deposition for the lawsuit, recorded in April, and it is not flattering.

After objecting to a mash-up of the two songs (“Mozart would be rolling in his grave right now”), he backtracks on comments he previously made to GQ about asking Pharrell to write a song in the vein of “Got to Give It Up.” He now says he made the whole story up to fortify his wounded ego: “After making six albums that I wrote and produced myself, the biggest hit of my career was written and produced by somebody else and I was jealous and I wanted some of the credit.”

But the most striking revelation comes when Thicke tries to explain his role—or lack thereof—in the song’s creation:

Q: Were you present during the creation of “Blurred Lines”?

Thicke: I was present. Obviously, I sang it. I had to be there.

Q: When the rhythm track was being created, were you there with Pharrell?

Thicke: To be honest, that’s the only part where—I was high on Vicodin and alcohol when I showed up at the studio. So my recollection is when we made the song, I thought I wanted—I —I wanted to be more involved than I actually was by the time, nine months later, it became a huge hit and I wanted credit. So I started kind of convincing myself that I was a little more part of it than I was and I—because I didn’t want him—I wanted some credit for this big hit. But the reality is, is that Pharrell had the beat and he wrote almost every single part of the song.

He later says he continued to exaggerate his participation in the making of the song to “help sell records” and because he was not sober in a single interview that he gave in 2013. That doesn’t make him look very good, of course, but it also helps undercut the comments he’s made that seem to bolster the Gaye estate’s case.

The lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial on Feb. 10, 2015.