Teddy Swims' 'Mr. Know It All' Sounds Like Gotye, but the Chords Don't Match

Teddy Swims' 'Mr. Know It All' does not sample Gotye's 'Somebody That I Used to Know'. Apple Music credits five writers, Swims (as Jaten Dimsdale) among them, and Wikipedia adds a sixth, Rosie Danvers; none is Gotye or Luiz Bonfá, whose 1967 guitar piece 'Seville' Gotye sampled. When we ran both records through the same tools, the chord patterns came out different as well.

People have compared the two songs since Swims released his on 10 April 2026. Type the title and 'sounds like' into Google and it suggests 'what song', 'another song', 'sting' and 'gotye'; add 'gotye' to the title and it offers 'does mr know it all sample gotye'. Under the official video, the comment YouTube ranks fifth, with about 1,200 likes, names Gotye's 2011 hit. Six months on, 'Mr. Know It All' is the most Shazamed song in Hungary.

Does 'Mr. Know It All' sample Gotye's 'Somebody That I Used to Know'?

Not by any credit we could find. Apple Music lists Swims, Alexander Izquierdo, Ed Drewett, Joshua Coleman and Julian Bunetta as the writers, and Wikipedia adds Rosie Danvers; Coleman, Bunetta and John Ryan produced it. Gotye produced 'Somebody That I Used to Know' and shares its writing credit with Bonfá, whose 'Seville' it samples; sample spotters also trace a xylophone part to a 1961 children's record of orchestral instruments and another snippet to a Mexicali Brass track. Using Gotye's recording or his tune would normally put him, or the writers he sampled, on that list. None of them is there.

Why 'Mr. Know It All' sounds like Gotye, and where it does not

'Mr. Know It All' runs at about 123 beats a minute and Gotye's song at about 129, five per cent apart. The chords do not match. Read two beats at a time, Swims' verse and chorus keep returning to E minor, G and B minor, then turn around on F sharp minor, or on D and A. Gotye's verse rocks mostly between D minor and C.

We also compared each song's overall harmony while allowing for any change of key. 'Mr. Know It All' came out no closer to 'Somebody That I Used to Know' than to a song nobody links it with, Jamie Miller's 'Babydoll': 0.93 to 0.97 against Gotye's sections, 0.96 to 0.97 against Miller's, on a scale where 1 means the same balance of notes.

The openings do not sound alike either. Our sound classifier hears Gotye's opening as double bass, plucked strings, cello and a tinkling, bell-like part; it hears Swims' opening as percussion and drums.

Both songs begin with a held-back, low verse and open up for the chorus: Swims goes from about 0.47 to 0.65 on our loudness scale, Gotye from about 0.31 to above 0.5 and later near 0.8. Both let the band play first, too: Gotye starts singing about 18 seconds into his video, Swims about 16 seconds into his. Our classifier also listed 'ska', among its weaker guesses, for both of Swims' verses, as it did for Gotye's song from about 2:48 to 3:25, near its end. Both titles also use the word 'know'.

On our measurements the likeness stops at mood and shape, and the record contains no Gotye sample.

'Mr. Know It All' original singer: Teddy Swims, not a Kelly Clarkson cover

Kelly Clarkson's 'Mr. Know It All' is a different song with the same title: the lead single from her 2011 album Stronger, released on 5 September 2011 and written by Brian Kennedy, Ester Dean, Brett James and Dante Jones. No writer appears on both songs. Clarkson's is a put-down of a man who claims to know her; Swims' is about a man who knows too much about how his own love stories end.

The meaning of 'Mr. Know It All': seeing the end before it starts

The first verse sketches a woman who likes the lows and the highs, and a narrator who has seen this before. He calls himself someone who dresses for the storm and then blames the sky, damned whichever way he turns, never surprised where he ends up.

In the chorus he says he should have warned her: he could see it coming as if in a crystal ball, he falls in love with misfortune, and he gives her everything she asks for while seeing a future she is missing from. Each half closes on “Oh, I wish I wasn't Mr. Know It All”. The second verse turns his habits into objects, dominoes set up only to watch them fall, a tennis ball thrown into the spinning blades overhead. In the bridge he wants neither to stay nor to run, watches her dance, falls for her anyway and admits he has flown nearer the sun than is safe, an Icarus image.

Swims has said the song explores how love can become a 'self-fulfilling contradiction': if you believe you already know how it ends, you hold back, and that distance is what ends it; if you fight the ending and try to control everything, you smother it instead.

'Mr. Know It All' has spent 28 weeks in the Dutch top 200

Spotify's weekly charts have had it in the Netherlands' top 200 for 28 weeks, starting with its first, with a best of 15th in August and 17th in the week ending 22 October. It has held places in Norway, Belgium, Switzerland, France and Germany for months. Its streaming base is continental Europe. America and Britain are a different story: neither country's weekly Spotify top 200 has carried it, yet Billboard's Hot 100 had it as high as 30th, and it has spent 15 weeks in all in Britain's Official Singles Chart Top 100, with a best of 54th in April.

Shazam's country charts lean the same way but reach further. On 26 October it was first in Hungary, fourth in Spain, 13th in Croatia, 15th in Denmark, 18th in Greece and 27th in the United States. It made the top 100 in 23 of the 70 national charts we read, a count that has stayed between 20 and 25 in our daily readings since 2 October. Hungary is where it has jumped: it sat between 47th and 79th there from 2 to 20 October, when it was 50th, and was first six days later. The official video had 20,630,672 views on 26 October.

Does 'Mr. Know It All' sound like Sting?

Sting is the other name Google offers after the title and 'sounds like', and he is not on the record either: he is not among the credited writers or performers. Swims pointed that way himself: on the day the single came out he told The Hollywood Reporter that his new music leans on 1980s rock, naming The Police, Sting and Phil Collins. The nearest thing our tools found is that weak 'ska' guess on his verses; The Police, Sting's old band, mixed reggae rhythms into rock.

So both comparisons describe a family likeness. Neither Gotye nor Sting is credited on 'Mr. Know It All'; it is Swims' own song, and it is on his album UGLY, due on 22 January 2027.