For Ed Sheeran, music is foremost important. He shared an example of this during his show in Sydney.
He recalls a nasty legal battle over his track Thinking Out Loud, which was accused of copying Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On in 2015. The trial lasted eight years, resulting in a court ruling in his favour.
“I got sued for a song by someone else that had said I had stolen their song, and the only thing I could do in that situation, because I hadn’t done it, was take it to court and prove that I hadn’t done it.”
During the investigation, the British singer revealed that he had to submit his phone to the authorities in court. “All I’ll say is that I’m glad there’s nothing weird on them, you know,” he quipped.
After this, Sheeran shares that he stopped using mobiles and switched fully to email during his tour in Australia in 2015.
“I did a tour down here [in Australia] for Multiply in 2015 and I remember at the end of that tour, I switched that phone off and going, ‘I do not want to use a mobile phone again,’” the musician notes. “I moved to email and I’ve used email since then.”
But then he powered back on the phone years after, and it hit him with a dose of nostalgia.
“I opened it again for this lawsuit and I switched it on to go through the emails and text messages and that sort of stuff and it was like going through a time machine to right back to 2015. But not only back to 2015 but to 2007, when I started texting on this number,” he tells the 70,000 crowd at Accor Stadium.
“It proper like spun me out. I was like frozen in time,” he shares, adding he browsed over the conversations of his old friends and family members.
Zeroing in on this experience, Sheeran turned it into the track Old Phone, part of his 2025 album Play.
“I find whenever anything negative happens in my life, I write a song about it and it somehow makes sense of that bad thing that’s happened. And it also works with something good that happens in my life – I write a song about it,” he says.
“Any song you hear of mine is basically like two-minute extremities. Either I feel a lot of this or I feel a lot of this … I find when the bad days happen, good songs come from it,” Sheeran concludes.
