For Ed Sheeran, music is the most important thing. He shared an example of this during his show in Sydney.
He remembers a nasty legal battle over his track Think out loudwho was accused of copying Marvin Gaye’s Let’s get started in 2015. The trial lasted eight years and resulted in a court ruling in his favor.
“I got sued for a song by someone else who said I stole their song, and the only thing I could do in that situation, because I didn’t do it, was take it to court and prove that I didn’t do it.”
During the investigation, the British singer revealed that he had to hand over his phone to authorities in court. “All I’m saying is I’m glad there’s nothing weird about it, you know,” he joked.
Following this, Sheeran explains that he stopped using mobile phones during his 2015 tour of Australia and switched completely to email.
“I took a tour here [in Australia] for Multiply in 2015 and I remember turning off the phone at the end of that tour and saying, ‘I don’t want to use a cell phone anymore,'” the musician notes. “I switched to email and I’ve been using email ever since.”
But when he turned the phone back on years later, he got a dose of nostalgia.
“I opened it again before this trial and turned it on to go through the emails and text messages and stuff like that and it was like going through a time machine, back to 2015. But not just back to 2015, but to 2007, when I started texting on this number,” he tells the 70,000 spectators at Accor Stadium.
“I felt like I was being thrown out. I was frozen in time,” he says, adding that he scrolled through the conversations of his old friends and relatives.
Sheeran focused on this experience and turned it into a song Old telephonepart of his 2025 album Play.
“I find that whenever something negative happens in my life, I write a song about it and it somehow gives meaning to that bad thing that happened. And it also works with something good that happens in my life — I write a song about it,” he says.
“Every song you hear from me is basically like two-minute limbs. Either I’m feeling a lot of this, or I’m feeling a lot of this… I find that when the bad days happen, good songs come out of them,” Sheeran concludes.
