Multi-billion-streamed recording artist, Ed Sheeran, remembers the day it all
started. The day the proverbial key went into the ignition of his songwriting efforts. The British-born Sheeran, who is celebrating the 10-year anniversary of his debut LP, “+,” this year with an upcoming anniversary show on September 2, tells Rebecca Judd from The Rebecca Judd Show on Apple Music 1 that he was just a kid when it clicked. The “Perfect” singer remembers that he attended an afternoon Damien Rice concert when the light bulb officially went off.
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Memorably, the show was 18 and under and if adults wanted to attend, they had to be accompanied by a child. “No alcohol, no nothing,” Sheeran tells Apple. After the gig, Sheeran and his father stopped at a nearby watering hole for a pint, and well, there was Rice. “So I met him,” Sheeran says. “And that was the day I started songwriting.”
But the lucky chance meeting and a moment of great creative inspiration didn’t necessarily lead to an immediate, fast friendship between the two famed artists, Sheeran adds. Not even by the time Sheeran had become a pop music household name, in his own respect.
“Van [Morrison] had reached out,” Sheeran tells Apple Music. “Eric Clapton reached out, Eminem had reached out, Jay-Z had reached out. There’s all these people that I loved as a kid, and they’d all reached out. And I was kind of like, ‘Why hasn’t he [Rice] reached out?’”
The reason, though, is that Rice is a particularly hard person to find and nail down for tea and sandwiches. Nevertheless, he and Sheeran have since connected and, it would seem, have even formed long-lasting respect for one another. “Now we’ve had our conversation,” Sheeran says. “There’s so many different elements to it. He, for instance, is just a hard man to contact… He lives in the middle of nowhere.”
The two famous songwriters, Sheeran says, recently spent time together in Iceland, which included a day hike and a dip in hot springs. They spent the entire time chatting, Sheeran says, perhaps even planting the seeds for a future collaboration? Despite the initial bite of anxiety about the two getting to know one another, personally and professionally, Sheeran explains that, in the end, everything happened just as it should have between him and his songwriting hero.
“I think I had an opportunity [to meet Rice],” Sheeran says. “[In] 2014 when he was releasing an album… and I think it just would’ve been a different vibe. I now have special memories with people that inspired me to make music rather than a selfie.”
Photo Credit: Zakary Walters
