A pop superstar for nearly a decade and a half, Ed Sheeran is always mindful of what — and who — is coming up next.
On the first track of “Play,” his eighth studio album, out Friday, he raps a verse about the anxieties that have wracked him in recent years, including the loss of two close friends, his wife’s cancer scare and the legal challenges to his songwriting credits. But on “Opening,” he’s also puffing his chest about his successes, his influence and what feels like a light wariness about the “replacements” rising just below him.
In a conversation this week on Popcast, The New York Times’s music show, Sheeran was slightly more generous about the generations of male pop vocalists who have emerged.
“I think it’s a bad thing to look at them as kind of encroaching on your space, because my space is my space,” Sheeran said.
He’s not ready to cede it. “Play” is the sunburst following Sheeran’s very cloudy stretch of emotionally low years, which led to some of the grimmest music of his career. The new album returns to the bright optimism of Sheeran-core, with wistful songs like “Camera” and “In Other Words.” They recall his anthems “Perfect” and “Thinking Out Loud,” which made him a defining pop artist of the modern era.
“Play” also includes Sheeran’s first foray into Persian-influenced music (“Azizam”), and his first song released in collaboration with Indian songwriters (“Sapphire”), following past collaborations with Nigerian and Ghanaian artists. “Sometimes I think as Westerners, we have this view that the West is it, when actually, the world is huge,” he said, noting how his extensive touring around the world has led him to learn about and embrace pop modes beyond the ones he grew up on.
And if those songs are not as broadly successful as the oodles of platinum hits he already has under his belt, it’s a bump he’s willing to endure.
“People are always listening to [expletive] that they’re familiar with. And I think that when you’re making new records, there has to be some element of that,” Sheeran said, “whilst trying to push the needle of doing things that you haven’t done before.”
These are edited excerpts from the Popcast conversation, which can be watched in full here or listened to in full below.
JON CARAMANICA Right now in the music business, you have a lot of surprise releases that are no longer a surprise: “I’m going to release this surprise album in two weeks!” And that’s the event. Yours feels more like a classic rollout with multiple singles, like it’s the ’90s or 2000s.
ED SHEERAN I just don’t think I’m that artist. My fan base does take a while to find things. “Shivers” and “Bad Habits” both ended up being quite big hits, but they took a long time to find a rhythm — the same as “Azizam” and “Sapphire.” They’re just not “show up day one and stream 20 million times”-type fans, but over the course of a year they do.
So I knew my rollout just had to be a bit more traditional. I think because I’m 34 and I’ve been doing it for 15 years, it’s not the same as it was when I was a teenager, and I had teenage fans. My fans have kids, and they take longer to find stuff. They’re not actively seeking out new music every day. People go back and forth on whether radio is important anymore, but it certainly is to me and I really feel like it creates hits.
CARAMANICA When we spoke a decade ago, you said how much you love statistics and how focused you were on that aspect of the business. Are you still granular on the charts, the streaming data?
SHEERAN I sort of got over all of that at the end of the Divide tour. I think all of that was linked to being a quite unpopular nerdy kid at school who played music that everyone took the piss out of. No one ever really thought that I’d be successful. Then success started to happen and I was getting obsessed with the fact that success was happening and it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
I’d describe it like if Usain Bolt sets a record, someone’s going to break that record eventually, and I think he’s probably got over that fact. But everything I was doing seemed to be working and I was pushing it further and further. After the Divide tour had broken all these records and “Shape of You” had done this and that, it got to a point where I was like, cool, I’ve done it and someone else is going to beat those records but at least I’ve done it. Then you can kind of move on.
JOE COSCARELLI Your last couple of singles haven’t reached the Top 40 in the U.S. Is that something you look at and think, “I just need another Top 40, another Top 10,” or have you totally lost that?
SHEERAN I feel like “Azizam” as a lead single — some press in the U.K. said it was predictable, but I think Iranian-infused folk-pop as a first single is kind of risky. I kind of just want to touch new ground in my career rather than travel over the same things even if I know it’s going to work.
I have two young girls, I have a family, a wife, a home — pop is a young person’s game and you have to really, really be in it and want it. I’ve found myself stepping back more and more and being like, actually, I’m really valuing family. I dropped off my kid at her first day of school today.
Whereas before — like, I hung out with Alex Warren at Coachella when “Ordinary” was really having a moment. And he was like, 16 hours a day, every single day. I remember doing that. And I remember looking at that at Coachella and being like, yeah, I’m good. Not for me anymore.
COSCARELLI On “Opening,” you have this rap verse and one of the things you say is “I look down and I see some replacements coming up behind me.” We’re in a moment where the male singer-songwriter is a bit ascendant. Is there any jealousy?
SHEERAN That’s every year, by the way, since I’ve had success. I remember having success on “+” and then Shawn Mendes released “Life of the Party” and suddenly he was the new singer-songwriter.
I had John Mayer come to a show around that time and he sat with me backstage and he said, “When I was your age, people always said that one day there’s going to be someone who comes along and does what you do, but different.” He said, “All I want you to know is I’m recognizing it’s you and I’m really happy for you. And I’m here for whatever you need.” And I felt that from Elton John, as well. He’s always celebrating new artists coming through. From that point, I’ve always tried to embrace the new people.
COSCARELLI You lost your close friend, Jamal Edwards, a couple years ago and had this period of depression and music that came out of it. When were you able to turn that corner in your grief?
SHEERAN I definitely had to sit with it for a while, because he died and then [Sheeran’s wife] Cherry had her cancer diagnosis and then the court case started, and then mid-court-case my friend Shane died, as well. I went straight into my second child getting born, straight into tour, then Cherry’s operation to take out the tumor. Then we went straight into “-,” so I’d say it was like two years of real cloudiness.
CARAMANICA Does that account for the brightness of this album?
SHEERAN 100 percent. This is a complete knee-jerk reaction of like, this has to be the like brightest, Technicolor record that we can make. I’m not playing “Eyes Closed” in the house to my daughter, but I’m playing “Sapphire.”
COSCARELLI You mentioned the court case. You’ve been the subject of some accusations over the years that your music plagiarized Marvin Gaye, among others. You’ve given pre-emptive credit to TLC on “Shape of You.” You’ve settled some cases.
SHEERAN We settled one case, and that’s why all the other cases came. I went on advice on the first one, then that’s when the other cases came because people were like, oh, there’s a habit of this — you’ve settled.
Everyone settles behind the scenes — it’s not good P.R. being called a thief publicly and that stain is always there, for the rest of my life. But I can’t just be chucking money and settling for the rest of my life, so I had to nip it in the bud.
COSCARELLI Why did you feel like you needed to be the person to take it to trial, putting yourself and your songwriting on the line in that way?
SHEERAN Because I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’m not a piggy bank for someone to prod. There’s some vindication where you see people actually go, “Oh yeah, actually, you’re right.” You see all the things click, even with the other side. It wasn’t a fun thing to do, but it definitely has achieved something positive. The Dua Lipa case never went to court. It has set a precedent.
COSCARELLI Is it true that you now record yourself writing everything?
SHEERAN I’ve done that since 2017, so since the second court case.
COSCARELLI As a pre-emptive defense?
SHEERAN Yeah, and it helps. We’ve had claims come and you just send them all the raw footage.
COSCARELLI And then you never hear from them again.
SHEERAN Literally, yeah.
CARAMANICA Do you feel like it’s actually an attack on all of your artistry that they’re trying to invalidate? Not just, “Hey, you stole this bit of this song,” but also, “This guy doesn’t belong here?”
SHEERAN Honestly I think “Perfect” came from that scenario because “Thinking Out Loud” was my biggest love song at the time and then that lawsuit happened and I wanted to prove I can do it again but on my own — no co-writer. I’m going to write a song, 100 percent me, and I’m going to put it out and it’s going to be as successful.
I think I have a lot in my career of people being like, “Why the [expletive] are you doing well?” I think people are confused with it and maybe it stems from that — “Well, you must have stolen something to get in this position.”
CARAMANICA You also say in the opening song: I took my fair share of ridicule and I’ve never been the coolest, but I’ve been around the longest. We’re talking in year 14 or 15 of your career, and that’s still a thing that you feel like you need to say.
SHEERAN That is still here. I am still a punchline to jokes. When “Bad Habits” came out, no one liked it. When “Shivers” came out, no one liked it. It’s only five years down the line where people are like, oh, it was actually an all-right pop song.
COSCARELLI What would it look like for Ed Sheeran to not be a punching bag among music fans?
SHEERAN I was looking at Chris Martin recently and I do think that at some point you transcend all of it. Coldplay were punching bags for years and I’m a huge Coldplay fan. I think there comes a point in your career — Phil Collins definitely hit that point — where you transcend it, and I’m not at that point yet. I reckon there might be an element of that eventually, you’ve just kind of got to outlast it.
Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter for The Times who focuses on popular music and a co-host of the Times podcast “Popcast (Deluxe).”
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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