This story is part of the 2025 TIME100. Read Chris Hemsworth’s tribute to Ed Sheeran here.
There’s a moment in the middle of Ed Sheeran’s secret St. Patrick’s Day show in Boston when the audience almost seems to forget that he’s there. Sheeran has packed an Irish pub downtown called the Dubliner with 300 superfans, who have been shouting out nearly every word as he plays massive hits like “Shape of You,” “Perfect,” and “Bad Habits.”
But then Sheeran transitions to a set of traditional Irish songs alongside the Irish folk band Beoga, trading verses with the little-known singer Aaron Rowe. And before long, Guinness is flowing, the Irish flags and Kneecap balaclavas are out, and the crowd is not facing him but each other, clapping each other on the back, embracing each other heartily, and punching their fists in the air while belting the classic Irish ballad “Grace”:
“Just hold me in your arms and let this moment linger
They’ll take me out at dawn and I will die (I will die! I will die! I will die!)”
The scene is no longer of a pop star lording over his stan-dom, but a group of musicians using their passion and talents to create an atmosphere of warmth, identity, and a sense of home. And Sheeran, onstage, seems absolutely chuffed by this shift. “It’s so nourishing for the soul,” he tells me when I meet up with him again the day after in Los Angeles, where he’s previewing his upcoming album, Play, for a group of industry insiders.
In prior eras, Sheeran says, he treated being a mainstream pop star almost like a competition, pushing his reach from theaters to arenas to stadiums. His efforts were wildly successful: For much of the 2010s, Sheeran’s songs coursed through public spaces like oxygen. Other songwriters and musical fads came and went, but Sheeran continued to crank out ubiquitous hits, sometimes writing them on his own—a rarity in an era of ballooning songwriter credits. In the 2010s on Spotify, he outstreamed collaborators like Beyoncé and Justin Bieber and even his close friend Taylor Swift—who, in a 2017 TIME 100 tribute, praised him as having “one of the most impressive self-made careers in music.” He’s now the all-time sixth-most streamed artist on Spotify, and has shattered all sorts of streaming and concert attendance records around the world.
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But all of that record-breaking “didn’t really make me feel anything,” he says. So even as he prepares for his next blockbuster album—which does not yet have a release date—he’s actively trying to change his life to reflect his new priorities. That includes finding happiness in playing live music in small venues; in embracing fatherhood; in forging global alliances with musicians from China to India; and in leaning into his role as pop’s great facilitator—who doesn’t need to always be at the center of things, but who is instead always creating spaces for those seeking community, empathy, and wonder.
“I think now I’ve explored everything,” he says. “So it is kind of stripping it back a little bit and finding the joy in creating sh-t.”
These days, pop stars can catapult to fame with a single video or two on social media. Ed Sheeran’s rise was far slower and physically exhausting. He arrived in London as a teenager and grinded out small gigs in which he sometimes merely served as background music. “Early on in my career, I played a wedding and got paid like £500 and remember thinking, ‘This is it,’” he reminisces. “Maybe I wasn’t going to make a great living from it, but I could definitely make a living.”
He was soon selling out small shows and also grew a devoted following on YouTube, winning over fans like Elton John and Jamie Foxx due to his craftsmanship and fearlessness in playing his songs in any room, from acoustic dens to rap clubs. By the mid-2010s, Sheeran was penning one megahit after another. In January 2017, both “Shape of You” and “Castle on the Hill” broke the record for the most streams on Spotify within 24 hours of their release. Thirteen of Sheeran’s songs have now crossed one billion streams on Spotify, with nine of those released between 2017 and 2021.
“With every song that’s been a hit, there’s usually a feeling in the studio when you get really excited,” he says. “It’s usually before the second verse, second chorus, when you get the first real glimpse of it—and I think it’s the best feeling in the world.”
But Sheeran’s unrelenting pace slowed in 2022, when he was confronted by a series of unexpected tragedies. His best friend Jamal Edwards—who helped the young singer-songwriter find an audience in 2010—died at the age of 31 from cardiac arrest caused by drug usage. Sheeran’s wife, Cherry Seaborn—who he met in school—was diagnosed with a tumor while she was pregnant with their second child. And Sheeran became embroiled in several lawsuits in which he was accused of plagiarizing some of his biggest songs, most notably “Thinking Out Loud.” In 2023, a court date forced Sheeran to miss his grandmother’s funeral.
The lawsuits pained him especially because he prided himself on his autonomy and creativity as a songwriter. Pop music, he argued, was built on a shared, limited vocabulary of chords and notes, and the great songwriters of every era were always echoing what came before them, whether unintentionally or in homage. Sheeran threatened to quit music altogether if he lost. “I don’t see why I would write songs ever again if someone owns the color blue,” he says.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sheeran’s music turned very dark during this period. His two albums from 2023— − (pronounced “Subtract”) and Autumn Variations, which he self-released partly in order to avoid the weight of commercial expectation—are rife with depression and anxiety. Sheeran didn’t promote either of them very much, and they sold significantly less than his previous blockbusters. At live shows, he broke down in tears.
Sheeran says he got some key advice in navigating this stretch from his fellow British music icon Elton John, whom he chats with frequently about music, life, and longevity in a notoriously fickle industry. John compared Autumn Variations to his own downtempo, plaintive 1970 album Tumbleweed Connection—and reminded him his music career should not be thought of as a constantly ascending escalator. “He’s had decades of his career where things haven’t gone well, and then suddenly he comes back with The Lion King or something like that,” Sheeran says. “It’s an inspiring thing, because it just means that you don’t ever have to judge your career on how you are at that point in time.”
Sheeran says that he still struggles with grief and sadness. “One thing I’ve learned about depression is you don’t take a magic pill and it’s suddenly gone,” he says. “But you can have periods of your life where you’re better, and periods of your life where you’re not. It gets less and less painful year on year, but always allow yourself to feel grief. Don’t put it in a box and lock it away.”
For all of his outrageous success, Sheeran comes off as strikingly normal. At a music video shoot for his upcoming song, “Old Phone,” before the Boston pub gig, he is soft-spoken, unassuming, and unfailingly polite, shaking hands with nearly everyone in the crew and building staff who has surreptitiously gathered for a glimpse of his iconic red mop. Sheeran is well aware that he doesn’t look like your typical pop star. “If you went back to any high school in Great Britain and said, ‘Who’s gonna rap on a song with 50 Cent and Eminem?’ You probably wouldn’t point to this specky ginger kid,” he says, smiling. He once described his looks as a “face for the radio.”
But Sheeran’s ordinariness is his first superpower. Rather than singing about his wealth, fame, or power, Sheeran mostly writes easy-to-follow songs about the fundamental highs and lows of everyday life, from love (“Perfect”) to sex (“Shape of You”) to addiction (“Bad Habits”) to death (“Small Bump”). These songs’ straightforwardness, especially when performed unornamented and earnestly by Sheeran himself, allow listeners of all stripes to immediately see themselves inside of their big, relatable emotions. “He sings sentences that we say all the time, but nobody ever puts them together like that in a song,” says Benny Blanco, a hitmaker and one of Sheeran’s longtime collaborators. “The thing that makes him so good—and I’m in a similar spot—we’re just kind of like the average Joe that shouldn’t have really made it, but somehow we did. He has that humility and that insecurity, and I think that’s what makes him so relatable.”
Critics aren’t always fans of his songs, citing “bland wisdom” or “trite innocence.” Sheeran says their extreme sincerity is often crucial to their populist appeal—and their omnipresence at big life events, from proposals to weddings to funerals. “The moment you try to be something that you’re not, people see that,” he says. “I’m just myself, and I think that goes a long way.”
Sheeran’s second superpower is a knack for pop hooks. In today’s starmarker machine that is the pop industry, corporations gather entire rooms full of elite songwriters to formulate songs possessing an ineffable catchiness that Sheeran often achieves alone, in his bedroom or tour bus. Sheeran spits out quality songs at frightening speed: He recalls once writing eight songs in a single day, including the U.K. No. 1 hit “Eastside,” and believes that “all of the best songs are written within a three-hour period.”
“Normally, it takes me like a week to write a good song,” Blanco says. “He does not leave the studio until he writes three songs in a day. It’s insane.”
Sheeran’s success also comes from his unique ability to understand when to fold the edges of the Western pop mainstream into its center. He has repeatedly synthesized the best parts of global music—British grime, dancehall, reggaeton—into universally palatable anthems. While Sheeran’s genre explorations have at times led to accusations of appropriation, Sheeran has collaborated with—and been embraced by—musical icons across the world, from Nigeria’s Burna Boy to K-pop’s Jessi.
During the nadir of his grief and court cases, Sheeran lost some of his joy for music making. But with time, his mood began to rise, due to several factors, he says. His wife’s tumor was successfully removed after she gave birth. His daughters, Lyra, 4, and Jupiter, 2, are happy and healthy. He recently decided to go fully sober after years of binge drinking. And he won victories in plagiarism cases in both the U.K. and the U.S. For years, Sheeran says he felt like other songwriters were using him as a “piggy bank, where people can just shake it,” he says. But since his two major court wins, he says that “everyone’s left me the f-ck alone—and the freedom really just lifted a weight.”
Sheeran’s new album Play attempts to turn the page. The project, which he describes as “technicolor” and “explorative,” kicks off his second five-album cycle. (His first five were all named after mathematical symbols; his next five will be music playback commands.) His desire for a narrative reboot is exemplified in a song from the new album in which he sings about anxieties and loss before commanding himself to “draw the line/ for the sake of your family and friends.” Once he is able to shake off his blues, he sings, “the day bursts wide open.”
True to his prolific nature, Sheeran penned more than 320 songs for Play over the past four years before whittling them down to about 13, he says. While Sheeran has always had a global focus, this one is perhaps the most far-reaching. The Swedish-Iranian producer Ilya Salmanzadeh, for instance, introduced him to Farsi music, which led to the lead single “Azizam.” Since its release, the song has been embraced by Iranian audiences around the world. And Sheeran brought his family to Goa last year to finish the record, and says that playing with more than a dozen musicians there was liberating. “In Western pop music, it can get quite stagnant and same-y and trend-following,” he says. “Whereas in India, I found that it was just their own wave, and it just is rather than trying to fit in things.” On one upcoming song, Sheeran sings in Punjabi alongside the massively popular Hindi singer Arijit Singh.
Indian and Farsi music were new to Sheeran, but he says that their rhythmic and harmonic aspects struck him as eerily similar to Celtic music, which he grew up with thanks to his Irish father. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Sheeran looked so thrilled playing “Azizam” at the Dubliner alongside Beoga, who tackled its racing triplet feel with stomping aplomb. Throughout the show, Sheeran often drifted to the back of the stage to lock into tight grooves with bodhrán (an Irish drum) player Eamon Murray, as fiddle player Niamh Dunne carved out fiery solos. Sheeran and Beoga have played together in many trad sessions, in which musicians gather in a pub for hours to play classic Irish songs and swap stories. In these jams, each singer gets a turn in the spotlight before melding back into the collective. “It’s one of my favorite things to do,” Sheeran says.
The fact that Sheeran introduced this new cross-cultural song in such collaborative settings—he played it as a surprise a few days before at a New Orleans second line parade—shows his recent prioritization of communal uplift as opposed to the solo spotlight. Earlier this year, Sheeran launched the Ed Sheeran Foundation, which urges the British government to put £250 million of funding toward music education. “It’s so criminally underfunded: Schools that I’ve been visiting don’t even have music teachers anymore,” he says. This absence strikes him as odd especially given how vital culture has been to the U.K.’s ongoing global soft power. “This is what actually makes our country loved around the world,” he says. “There’s no new generation of stars being formed, and no one in the government seems to really look at it and realize that.”
In interviews in Boston and Los Angeles, Sheeran repeatedly talks about how Play is an album driven by joy and global exploration. But dark clouds still hover over some of the songs—most notably the harrowing “Old Phone,” which stems from an experience Sheeran had during one of his court cases, when a judge asked him to turn over his old devices as part of evidence.
Sheeran hasn’t carried a phone in a decade, and when he switched on his latest phone from 2015, he was shocked by how many ghosts from his past flashed across his screen. “The first text was from my friend who died. The second text was from an ex-girlfriend, having an argument. The third text was from a family member I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years,” he says.
The song describes Sheeran becoming nearly paralyzed with an overwhelming sense of loss—before firmly telling himself to snap out of it. Sheeran says that the moment “really f-cking spun me out,” and served as a reminder to try to live in the present at all times. “This isn’t healthy, trying to relive all of this,” he says. “I’m now 34, married with kids, and I’m looking forward rather than back.”
So off Sheeran goes, criss-crossing the world, jamming with musicians, playing in pubs, essentially playing the role of the world’s most famous busker, making the ordinary seem grand and the grand seem ordinary. It is this approach that just may allow Sheeran to return to stratospheric heights of success, especially in Asian markets with massive streaming audiences, where he’s focusing much of his creative efforts.
But if he doesn’t, he says he won’t be too bothered—and he’ll probably continue showing up to sing and jam with local musicians at a pub near you. “I’ve kind of got to a point of my career where I’m just sort of like, ‘Am I enjoying it?’” rather than, ‘Is it commercially doing well?’”
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