One voice and the six strings of a guitar were all Ed Sheeran needed to discover the formula for success, and what allowed him to stop being the weird kid at school to become one of the most recognized artists on the international scene. Although he was born in Halifax, in the north of England, Ed Sheeran spent most of his childhood in Framlingham, a small town northeast of London where he was inspired by ‘Castle on the hill ‘, where he says he “broke his leg” at the age of 6, smoked cigarettes at 15, got drunk with his friends, and had his first kiss on a Friday night. It was in high school that he began to play the guitar and, after a concert by Damien Rice that he attended at the age of 12, he discovered that he wanted to dedicate himself to music, because, in addition to making him happy, it also helped him to socialize and stop being an object of being teased for being a redhead, wearing glasses, or being a stutterer, which he overcame rapping Eminem.
Born worker
That fact also encouraged him to continue his musical and acting training in companies such as the British Youth Music Theater (BYMT), where in 2007 he was part of the cast of Frankenstein under Nick Stimson, who has confessed to Efe that Ed Sheeran was a “extremely hardworking” student. Nick Stimson especially remembers one night when Ed Sheeran caught his attention when he appeared with his guitar and played some of his songs. “I felt like I was listening to someone extraordinarily talented, he was interpreting in a way that I had never seen in anyone before,” he comments.
The sum of the effort
Also present at that evening was his partner and friend Matt Brinkler, who tells EFE how Ed Sheeran asked him years later to sleep on his sofa for a while when he left for London to make a living. “He worked hard for what he wanted to do, he played the guitar every day and bowled seven days a week, and hundreds a year,” he adds. The singer “put all his eggs in a single basket and focused his effort on be successful in the music industry, even if he didn’t have a place to call home, “journalist Andrew Bullock, who met him with ‘The A Team’, told EFE, like so many who he captivated with his” compositional skills and humility that he gave off “. The unique nuances of young Ed Sheeran convinced Elton John himself, who made him his ‘protégé’ and taught him the infallible equation to “circumvent the paths of the music industry” in which he debuted in 2011 with ‘+’ (Plus) , with jewels like ‘Lego House’ or ‘Drunk’.
Multiply success
He left behind the decadence of the London pubs that saw him grow up and began composing for stars like One Direction, to whom he gave the precious ‘Little Things’; or Taylor Swift, with whom he wrote and performed together ‘Everything has changed’ to later accompany her as the opening act for her on her ‘Red’ tour throughout the United States. That allowed him to make himself known to a wider audience at the same time and, during the trip, his head did not stop machining songs. A total of 120 who cleared the ‘X’ (Multiply) from their second album, which included the bridal ‘Thinking Out Loud’- with which he won the Grammy for best song of the year in 2016-, in addition to a song to the sea of Tenerife.
Divide the pressure
However, the success and long tours aggravated Ed Sheeran’s mental health and anxiety, who decided to take some time to reconnect with himself; being able to “see the world with his eyes and not through a screen”, travel and bond with his childhood love and now, his wife, Cherry Seaborn. He dedicated ‘Perfect’ to her, the first song he composed of his third album ‘÷’ (Divide), which he released in 2017 after a year disappeared from the map and turned into a happier man, as he recounted in ‘Happier’, along with other hits such as’ Shape of you ‘or the energetic’ Barcelona ‘, in which it includes some words in Spanish. ‘÷’ was proclaimed the best album of the year with 15 million copies sold. It was succeeded by ‘nº 6’, an album of collaborations with artists such as Justin Bieber or Camila Cabello, to later enter a musical lethargy again, only interrupted by surprise last Christmas with the release of ‘Afterglow’. guitar by the brush, he exploited his more ‘pollockian’ artistic side in paintings that are now auctioned for charities; and in September 2020 he welcomed his first daughter, Lyra Antartica. Now that he reaches 30 years old, those who, like Brinkler, knew him as a young man, recognize that “his music has changed with him, but that he is the same Ed Sheeran who played the guitar sitting on the floor of the hall” and there lies the formula for your success.
