I sung it once and that’s the version on the song, which is why it’s gentle and delicate. One night, Fred is like, ‘Hey, man, can you re-vocal this?’ And I could barely keep my eyes open.
We'd finish a day of sessions, have a load of wine, get on the weed pens, watch an Avengers movie, and just smash Doritos. We were living in this house in Nashville, which had an amazing wine cellar, and all of my friends had these weed pens. Fred and I wrote this song and my brother did a string part that went over the demo. “The reason ‘First Times’ is at this point in the album is so there can be an intake of breath from my fans, like, ‘OK, cool, there are songs on here for us.’ This is pretty much classic me format. You could put this song on at the office Christmas party and hopefully everyone's going to get twisted to it.” But the more and more my career's gone on, I like to do fun love songs sometimes. “I sometimes find myself in a vice-grip choke hold by the past songs I've written or the genre I'm in, or to always be a meaningful, deep singer-songwriter and write songs that really rip out someone’s heart. It's about what happened: I became a dad and all the noise was just shut off. So the verse is as chaotic as it comes, it’s just noise: This is what's going on my life. I wanted something you could open with in a stadium that was huge, but, at the same time, tiny. I wanted to do that again, but I didn’t really want to rap this time. “I had ‘Eraser’ on ÷, which was me summing up the last few years and letting people know where I was. But you should listen the way it’s intended to be listened to at least once.” And as you do that, read Sheeran’s intimate track-by-track guide to the album here. Put songs on a playlist, put the album on shuffle-whatever you want. “I don’t care what you do after your first listen. “Please just listen to it once in order, that’s all I ask,” he says. And he has just one request before you press play. All tied together by bare-skinned songwriting, = is Sheeran’s most personal, moving record to date. There’s ’80s-inspired pop (the gargantuan “Bad Habits”), sad bangers (“Overpass Graffiti”), a cinematic piano ballad (“The Joker and the Queen”), and even a child’s lullaby, written for his daughter (“Sandman”). You’ll find tracks from that time here (“First Times,” “Love in Slow Motion”), but-with Sheeran restlessly writing and recording right up until its release-= is a typically eclectic record from an artist who has always delighted in confounding expectations.
“It’s stuff that really has meant a lot to me.” The follow-up to 2017’s all-conquering ÷ was originally conceived as an acoustic record, with Sheeran setting up in Nashville way back in 2018 to work. “The theme of the record is me turning 30, becoming a dad, losing a friend, trying to balance work and marriage,” Ed Sheeran tells Apple Music of his fourth full-length LP, =.
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