Ed Sheeran is one of Britain’s biggest-selling male pop stars, and he’s sold out stadiums as an aw-shucks everyman writing peppy acoustic guitar songs with Disney wisdom.
Videos by American Songwriter
“Shape of You” defines Sheeran’s music in several ways. For starters, like he’s become accustomed to, there were plagiarism accusations to accompany the song’s massive commercial success.
Lyrically, “Shape of You” follows Sheeran’s preferred mode of fashioning flat charms over guitar loops.
To his credit, a lot of people like it, too.
Brown Eyed Girl
The dancehall track follows Sheeran singing over looped acoustic guitar percussion about a new romance.
The club isn’t the best place to find a lover
So the bar is where I go
Me and my friends at the table doing shots
Drinking fast and then we talk slow
Come over and start up a conversation with just me
And trust me, I’ll give it a chance now
Take my hand, stop, put Van the Man on the jukebox
And then we start to dance, and now I’m singing like
He’s in a bar “doing shots” with his friends but ditches the boys to go dancing with a girl. Sheeran stops at the jukebox to play Van Morrison, and one can assume it’s “Brown Eyed Girl” to fit with the tropical house of Sheeran’s wanting pop song.
I’m in love with the shape of you
We push and pull like a magnet do
Although my heart is falling too
I’m in love with your body
And last night you were in my room
And now my bedsheets smell like you
Every day discovering something brand new
I’m in love with your body
The Writers and Copyright Infringement
The Halifax-born singer wrote “Shape of You” with his producer Steve Mac and Snow Patrol guitarist and pianist Johnny McDaid.
But the writers used elements of TLC’s “No Scrubs,” so Sheeran, Mac, and McDaid now share songwriting credits with Kandi Burruss, Tameka “Tiny” Cottle, and Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs.
Meanwhile, Grime artist Sami Chokri (who performs as Sami Switch) and his co-writer Ross O’Donoghue sued Sheeran over similarities between “Shape of You” and the refrain from Chokri’s 2015 song “Oh Why.”
A judge ruled in Sheeran’s favor and said the singer “neither deliberately nor subconsciously” copied the refrain (Oh I, oh I, oh I, oh I).
After the verdict, Sheeran responded on Instagram and lamented how these lawsuits damage the songwriting industry.
It’s for Someone Else to Sing
Sheeran didn’t intend to sing “Shape of You” when he began writing the song; he thought it should go to another artist.
In a video interview with The New York Times, McDaid said, “[Sheeran] had already said everything he wanted to say for that moment on his record. We went in there just to write a song.”
The musical idea sprang from Mac playing the opening notes on a keyboard while Sheeran added percussion. The producer said Sheeran likes to work quickly and didn’t want to wait for Mac to create a drum loop, so he created one using his guitar.
They finished the track in 15 minutes. But they had to contend with Sheeran’s limited attention span.
“His attention span can be really low,” McDaid said. “One of the things I did to try to keep him in the room while I would be working on a track—I would have a suitcase full of Legos I’d pull into the hotel room, and say, ‘There you go, you build that.’”
After finishing the song, Sheeran thought it might work for Rihanna. Specifically, he pictured a duet between Rihanna and the British drum and bass group Rudimental.
Why Give It Away?
When Sheeran played “Shape of You” for his record label, they wondered why he wanted to give it away. Instead, he recorded it and added it to Divide.
It became Spotify’s most streamed song before being surpassed by The Weeknd’s 2020 electropop hit “Blinding Lights.” As of this writing, “Shape of You” is approaching 4 billion streams.
Body Object
What makes Sheeran so popular is his accessibility. Even in a boozy song about this woman’s body, Sheeran likes the “shape” of it. There’s a kind of rom-com innocence to it.
Shapes fit Sheeran’s preference for naming his albums after math symbols: +, ×, ÷, =, and −.
But, like most songwriters, he shapes his compositions from earlier works. Familiarity is the DNA of accessibility.
With all the math and copyright lawsuits, the question lingers: Is Sheeran simply a calculating man?
The line between inspiration and annexation is thin, and Sheeran has a point when he argues, “There are only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music.”
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
