Ed Sheeran - 'F1: The Movie' & 'Zootopia 2'

0:00Ed Sheeran:This episode of Awards Chatter is brought to you by AMC and AMC Plus, presenting The Audacity, the all-new drama from Emmy Award winner Jonathan Glatzer. Set inside the bubble of Silicon Valley, the series features a powerhouse cast led by Billy Magnuson, Sarah Goldberg, and Zach Galifianakis. Praised as irresistible by The Wall Street Journal, the darkly comedic drama looks at what happens when the architect shaping tomorrow can barely manage their lives today. For your Emmy consideration in all categories. Episodes available to screen at amcfyc.com.

0:42Ed Sheeran:Hi, everyone, and thank you for tuning in to the 615th episode of the Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter Podcast. I'm the host, Scott Feinberg, and my guest today is an English singer-songwriter who has been described by Rolling Stone as among the 21st century's very biggest global pop superstars, by the Los Angeles Times as arguably the most successful male pop star in the world, by the Guardian as the most commercially successful British artist of his age and an era-defining musician who has earned his place alongside Bowie, Elton, George Michael, Morrissey, and Elvis Costello in the pantheon of great British male solo artists, and by the New York Times as this generation's James Taylor, one of the few consistently bankable solo male global pop stars working and a defining pop artist of the modern era, Ed Sheeran.

1:32Ed Sheeran:At just 34, Sheeran is already a four-time Grammy winner who has had two songs top the Billboard Hot 100, Shape of You and Perfect, and four albums top the Billboard 200. On the back of his mega-hit 2017 album Divide, he was that year's best-selling musician in the world, and he ultimately became Spotify's second most streamed artist of the 2010s, behind only Drake. And today, with more than 200 million records sold worldwide, he is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, the third most followed person on Spotify, behind only the Indian singer Arijit Singh and Taylor Swift, and one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2025.

2:17Ed Sheeran:Earlier this fall, he released his eighth studio album, Play, and he is currently in the running for the Best Original Song Oscar for not one but two songs that he co-wrote and performed for Blockbuster 2025 films. Drive for F1 The Movie, which he wrote with John Mayer and Blake Slatkin, and Zoo for Zootopia 2, which he wrote with Shakira and Slatkin. Over the course of a conversation at the London West Hollywood Hotel, Sharon and I discussed his unlikely path from busking on the streets of London to superstardom, the origin stories of several of his biggest hits, including The A-Team, Sing, Thinking Out Loud, and Bad Habits, why he agreed to write songs for movies, and how doing so differs from the way he usually writes music, plus much more.

3:05Ed Sheeran:And so, without further ado, let's go to that conversation.

3:22Ed Sheeran:Ed, thank you so much for doing this podcast. Really thrilled and honored to have you. And on this one, we really, we go back and look at kind of the major moments and turning points in an artist's life, each episode. And I guess the first one, obviously, is if you can share with our listeners where you were born and raised in what your folks did for a living? I was born in a town called Halifax in Yorkshire and we moved to Suffolk which is on the east of England when I was about four maybe three three or four years old and I was raised there it's about three hours from London nearest town is a place called Ipswich and yes very much the countryside farming farming area my parents I've done if they've worn a few hats but they worked as curators for art galleries when I was younger and then they got into education and yeah yeah well did any of them also have a kind of a musical bone or where do you anybody else in the family my grandmother was a singer so I think she would have had the musical bone in my family on my mom's side and then on my dad's side my uncle was like the first guy to like teach me a guitar chord and then his daughter my cousin was like super influential she took me to the concert that made me want to be a singer songwriter damien rice at wheelins and stuff like that so yeah i have a few musical people in my family i know that you've spoken about how special and important damien rice was to you how old were you for that concert do you know what i don't actually remember specific age it was either it was 11 or 12 it was what it was between between then but young and so obviously correct me if any of this is wrong but you start singing in church around four yeah and as soon as we moved to suffolk actually my mom joined the church choir and me and my brother started going and guitar around the same age no guitar was like i watched the queen's jubilee 2002 eric clapton came on and played layla and And that sort of like opened my mind.

5:23Ed Sheeran:And then writing songs would have been even before the Damien Rice? No, that was the day I went to go and see Damien Rice. I went home and wrote songs. Yeah, that was the inspiration. I didn't really know that you could just be an acoustic singer-songwriter. I thought you had to have a band and it had to be like, you know, watching him play was the first time I'd seen anyone just be on stage just them. And I think it, yeah, without sounding too weird about it, I looked at it and was like, I think I could do that, you know, rather than like, I think when you watch, when I watch Clapton play, I was like, that is going to take a lot of practice.

5:59But I think that me writing songs from personal experience and singing them on an acoustic guitar didn't seem like too far fetched.

6:06Ed Sheeran:Now, what's interesting is that you did not long after that, you did have a band, right? Yeah. And so you were open to the idea of, was that just, you know, the appeal was that there were other people you could do, share your interests or what? No, there was my mate. I mean, he's still one of my best friends now. Fred was in my class and his little brother played drums and there was a battle of the bands. In my mind, we played like 70 shows. In reality, we probably played three. and yeah it was very much there was a there was a youth club near it's it's uh not there anywhere but there was a youth club in our hometown that used to every friday they would do events and every now and then they'd do a battle of the bands and you put the band together and you'd learn songs and you go and do that and yeah yeah so i guess an interesting thing is that you've you've described at least a part part of your childhood as being something that you've almost repressed in a way like a lot of kids unfortunately you you've said i guess you were picked on a bit and they latched onto things, among other things you've talked about, was having a bit of a stammer.

7:11Ed Sheeran:Music, in a way, was also a help with that, right, from what I gather, right? Was that helpful in overcoming that? Oh, yeah, totally. I think that, yeah, learning songs, it was mostly my uncle bought me Eminem's album when I was about 10 and learning how to rap along to him really helped my stammer. I don't think there's anyone who is a performer that hasn't had a similar childhood to that. I think inherently to want to be on stage and have people like you comes from a place of being a shy kid when people don't like you. I think there is a thread to that. I look at Elton's early career, people like David Bowie's early career.

7:48Like it feels similar.

7:52Ed Sheeran:Is it correct that obviously, you know, this would be before anyone else kind of taking a professional interest in you? and this would also be even when you're still in, I would imagine, high school, it would be, you started essentially your own label. Yeah. Well, essentially, yeah. I think it was like, I was making records in, I mean, it wasn't technically my label, I guess in name it was, yeah, but it wasn't like there was accounts for it or whatever. I was literally, I was burning CDs off a four track in my bedroom, printing off the covers myself in a printer that my mom helped me design and then selling them at school for this is like 13 years old yeah uh and you know making good money for a 13 year old i'd say yeah yeah well i was selling them for like two pounds and you know two pounds can go quite a long way and this is selling it to classmates yeah it's classmates teachers uh i remember going to we played actually with my friend fred we went to go and play his uncle's 50th or something like that sold them to their mates and whatnot and nice yeah well so between then and the age of about 16, did it just become so clear even to your parents that this was where you were headed?

9:07Ed Sheeran:Because I mean, not everybody's going to be permitted, I guess, by their parents to leave school and go pursue something of any nature. But it sounds like it was actually, it seems to me with your parents' support that that's what happened with you at 16? i listen i'd say like but my parents differed in their opinions i think my mom wanted a more uh safety blanket i think she wanted me to finish school and go to university and get a degree and and do all of that and i think my dad viewed higher education as something you actually have to really want to do it for it to um matter and i think he knew if i if i wanted to be a singer you can't go to university for that you have to you there's kind of like you have to join the school of hard knocks of go and play the open mic nights go and like thrash out in bars and pubs and clubs around the country and that's your university and i think he yeah was uh he basically said if you're going to do it you've got to work harder than people that you're on the bill with and uh don't expect it to remember very clear advisor like don't expect anyone to be looking for you like no one's searching for you so you've got to be out there and be in people's faces and so 16 almost 17 i guess is when you you said london was like three hours away is that what you said yeah so it was an hour on the train it was three hour car journey hour an hour on the train from ipswich we lived about 40 minutes from ipswich and so you moved there on your own yeah i got a uh a government grant to go to college there for two days a week in a place called bromelieu by bow um so I started that college and that essentially paid for my first apartment I lived above a pub called T-Bird Bar on Blackstock Road in Finsbury Park and that bar did open mic nights and I got to know the guy Lester there who ran the open mic nights who then also ran another open mic night in Finsbury Park that I get and then once you're there you basically you start networking and you meet the uh kind of underground network of open mic night promoters and and so yeah I mean I had seen once something where you were talking about like you go wherever they'll have you including if i don't know how many people had to say that they would be there but if somebody says they'd like you to come play in their home you would go oh yeah definitely yeah i'd go anywhere i played i once played a bingo hall uh whilst people were playing bingo and they didn't know that there was meant to be a gig and they did not want me there um no i played yeah literally anywhere anywhere that would have me.

11:42In my mind, I was sort of like, my songs are who I am. So it doesn't really matter where I'm playing them, as long as it's in front of an audience. So yeah, that was kind of my main thing.

11:54Ed Sheeran:So when people talk about busking, which is something that I guess it's not, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it's a word used as much in this country. And so I'm not, just to establish for people, does that mean literally you're out on the street performing and hoping people throw you some money or yeah I feel like there's there's definitely been a bit of like uh confusion with my origin story with that like I have busked yeah and there are photos of me busking from a young age but that wasn't like that wasn't what I was doing all the time I'd say I would do that once or twice a year but it was mostly I would say the main thing I was doing was at least one open mic night a night sometimes three in a different three in the night because you'd go and play four songs you get on the tube you go to the next place you play four songs you get in a tube and go to the next place and play four songs it was um just you were on a kind of a a circuit yeah and then I imagine during the day that's when you're doing your writing yeah precisely I mean like I didn't really like there was nothing else to do so I that was the only thing that I could do I had two days of college Monday Tuesday and then I was playing all the nights and then if I was in the day I was writing songs and trying to I think when you're playing pubs you have to catch people's attention so i would play a song and no one would perk up to it so that next day i'd be like i have to write a song to play tonight that catches people's attention instantly and i think that's what how my first record kind of got created and i mean to this day you're you're known for being so prolific as a songwriter i think you've said, you know, at least one song morning or essentially breakfast, lunch and dinner time.

13:32Ed Sheeran:Does that discipline to do that? I mean, a lot of people, especially after they achieve some success are not going to maintain that kind of rigor. But is this, does you trace that back to what your dad had, what you mentioned him saying to you? Or where was, where does that come from that you're going to really focus like that? Yeah, I think it's definitely connected to my dad and his idea of work ethic and how that helped. I mean, he was basically like, if you work harder than the person that you admire, you will get there. And that's just been something that I've sort of carried through life.

14:07You sort of create your own opportunities by just being out there and working. And I think very much with songs, for instance, the reason I write so many songs is you go in the studio, you dare to suck. If it's good, you keep it. If it's not, you scrap it and move on to the next one. And I don't really sweat the days that are bad. You just keep creating.

14:27Ed Sheeran:And was the way that you started out writing songs then, just process-wise, still pretty much the way you work today? I mean, was it, for instance, just did it tend to be music before lyrics or just some of that? It's a little bit of both. I'd say back then probably more lyrics before music, but the process back then, it was very traditionalist singer-songwriter, sit down with an acoustic guitar in your bed and strum it out and write it down and blah, blah, blah. I think now my process is so different because I travel so much and I work with so many different people and their process is different.

14:59And I might be, you know, I made my last record in India. I've been to West Africa and made a record. I've been to Nashville and made a record. Everywhere is different. there's different producers everywhere different collaborators everywhere different musicians everywhere and yeah it's a it's a different process and i never want to be i don't want to be bored making music i always want to be something that's pushing my boundaries and helping me learn because i you know i can i can be a singer songwriter for the rest of my life and just write acoustic songs that do the job but i always want to be trying to do something different i've just been watching that um mr scorsese documentary on apple and i love how after mean streets he does the what's the um alice um oh alice doesn't live here yeah yeah yeah and

15:46Ed Sheeran:that's the first i think it's that yeah i think it's that yeah and that's the first movie he does after mean streets to go right i'm not going to be the guy that makes the gangster movies i'm going to now do prove and i think that that's very much my ethos was music and kind of how i came around on doing the F1 song was just something different, you know, something different. No, definitely focus on that and how I wonder that potentially writing songs for movies almost is a different, clearly is a different sort of undertaking or assignment than just whatever it comes to. We'll get into that. But I wonder, you know, it seems like in 2010, that's the year before your first studio album was released and a year in which I read you'd done 300 live performances.

16:35Ed Sheeran:It seems like that was also the year when you met at least two people who helped to kind of put you in a position to be noticed for your, what was, the skills were clearly there. But it's like if a tree falls in a forest, I guess nobody's there. What happens doesn't make sound. In this case, can you just talk about who, for people who may not know, I think they probably know who Jamie Foxx is but Jamal Edwards yeah is gonna come factor in in a number of ways in your story I don't know that at least again maybe it could be wrong but in this country I'm not sure that people are as aware of yeah well he was sort of the forefront of youth culture in the UK at this point and he had a YouTube channel called SBTV that was primarily uh uk rap grime bashman uh r &b it was essentially like a channel that he put on the biggest stars of that time but it wasn't somewhere where a singer songwriter like me would pop up and we struck up a really close friendship i ended up actually living at his mum's for most of 2010 we did a lot of videos together and i think the fact of me being like slightly chubby ginger white kid with an acoustic guitar rapping on a channel where you know the UK's best rappers would be on this channel I stuck out and it something clicked there was sort of a groundswell of interest because I think when you're a singer-songwriter and you're playing singer-songwriter nights and you're one of five people on the bill you blend in and it doesn't matter what you're singing you're just one of many I think if you're you are the only singer-songwriter on a channel that lots of people have eyes on you stick out and yeah it was kind of like uh the the alchemy of that situation was it just came at the perfect time and what was the jamie fox thing jamie well so that it's all kind of part and parcel really i um i was in a sort of rut i'd been stuck in a rut but about three years playing the same acoustic nights with the same people with the same songs trying to get signed in London I had saved money from selling CDs but essentially for rent really and I had this I had this cash and my friend who was a poet uh Elizabeth was like oh my friend runs a poetry gig in uh Compton not Compton uh in Inglewood I can get you a slot there if you want and I was like yeah fuck it I'll book a plane and I'll fly there and my grandmother had a friend that lived in Beverly Hills.

19:05So I stayed with her and I arrived, I landed, I dropped my bags off. I got a cab to Inglewood. I went to this place, I met John who ran this thing called Fly Poet. And again, it like very similar to being on SBTV. Like I stuck out like a sore thumb in that room. I actually, I remember getting heckled as I was putting my loop box on and the guy who was on the mic was a comedian and was just sort of like, who the fuck is this kid? And I got up and I played it went really really well there's a video of it on uh on on youtube actually and from that gig john who ran the gig and another guy called adrian who who we were working with were like we can get you more shows and let's go here and let's go here so they took me to the r &b live at the key club and then like a bunch of other shows and then one of them was at the fox the foxhole it's kind of near nokia theater anyway it was a club that jamie ran uh and i got up same thing there got heckled got up played the show like really crushed like it was a really like amazing experience and i met jamie's manager at the time called marcus who said jamie does a serious xm show come on and play for him show him what you've got so then i went to that played for him and then ended up basically living at his for my duration of being in los angeles and i think flying home from the uk then after being so stagnant in the uk and going do you know what i went to los angeles for a month and I achieved that I can definitely make this work here and then I met Jamal and it all sort of went from there but I think there's a kind of confidence that's built in that situation of you know America's always seen as the place that's difficult to break and being there for a month there was so much like opportunity for stuff and I had like I was just buzzed when I came back just so excited to get stuck in because the UK is the size of California like it's the UK isn't a massive massive space and i was sort of like if i can do that within california i can definitely

20:58Ed Sheeran:do the uk one side note was it also the case i believe around that time that you seriously consider changing your name yeah totally well i just felt i didn't feel like ed sheeran was a good stage name uh at all and i felt like um it was a kind of common thing for singer songwriters and everyone just had their own name and it was so yeah i was sort of like i wanted to kind of rebrand myself um i'm so glad i didn't but what would you have been well this is the thing i wanted to call myself redwood but then like a year later there was a group who i'm actually good friends with who were on the x factor called jedwood who were mental um but yeah it wouldn't have been good maybe maybe redwood and jedwood yeah yeah the the path not taken there we go um so i guess it's later that same year 2010 you sign with asylum records yeah i actually signed second week of January I remember they came so I basically I had I'd made all these independent projects my last one I had this meeting with them in December 2010 and they wanted to sign then before me putting the EP out and I was like I've done so much work on this on my own I'm not having you take credit for it yes so I put out the record in January and then that record was the thing that like blew up and got people like super interested in me and then I signed to them second week of January and then three months later put out the A-Team and that was that.

22:19Ed Sheeran:So Atlantic Records comes in in 2011 is that what? So Asylum's like a subsidiary to Atlantic but I met the A &R at Atlantic by accident so Ed Howard who you know I'm still signed to him to this day his wife was a really well is a really really top songwriter and she'd written all these hits I met her in Notting Hill Arts Club in 2010 at a Bruno Mars show. Bruno had come over for like a showcase and I was there to see the show. She was like, oh, you should meet my husband. And I met him and I was like, hey, man. And I ended up staying at their house because I didn't have anywhere to stay. I was like, do you think I can crush at yours?

22:57And then it turns out that he was an A &R. And I got drunk with them that night and I played them a load of music. And he, yeah, from there was interested.

23:06Ed Sheeran:Amazing. um i guess a team was was gonna come out and it came out as a single but it was clearly gonna always be part of an album yeah called plus yeah i put it out as an independent single april 2010 and then it got pushed as a major label single uh june 2011 so the reason i ask is just you had in mind even before in the grand and relatively speaking anyone was really following you in a huge way you had already thought that your first albums were going to have this concept or theme of mathematical connotations where did that come from i think many things i i there's lots of artists that i admired at that age who had set plans out for themselves not least someone like quentin tarantino but also like um kenya west's first three albums uh college dropout late registration graduation and then it was meant to be good ass job after that i loved that he'd planned out the the themes of those records and yeah it was just me going that's going to be the next 15 years of my life so i'm going to i'm going to set out these plans and the records are going to sound like this and i'll move from one to the other once they're done and i think it just gave me a script to follow so the first thing that most people would have heard of yours was the a-team right and goes to number 16 on the billboard hot 100 for a first thing that people are hearing that's incredible yeah i mean for also like british music breaking into the united states is there's lots of big uk artists but it is few and far between you know but we're a tiny tiny island trying to break into a place where remember when i first came over i did a uh you know one of these like pizza parties at a radio station where you go in you go hey can you play my song and blah blah blah and uh i remember sitting with the guy and he looked at me in his office and it was just me and him and he went i've already got jason mraz why do i need you and and that is the case like america has an incredible singer songwriters they don't need uk artists coming in so it really felt like a big breakthrough being able to come over here and uh have people be interested and that would be the same it would be a while uh before this happened but that would be the song where you perform on the grammys for the first time yeah with elton yeah actually also just earlier this year was chosen by rolling stone as one of the 250 greatest songs of the 21st century so far.

25:29Ed Sheeran:I didn't know that. You didn't know? No, I didn't know that. That's one of the rare times that I feel like people are nice. So that's sweet. Thank you. Sure. Well, I guess just because it was the catalyst for so much that followed, can you share, I have kind of the rough idea of what inspired that song, but just you've said it was at a time when you were maybe more, I don't know if naive is the right word or whatever about sheltered or something about that. Well, I mean, I didn't, I didn't grow up. I mean, I wouldn't say I grew up wealthy, but I didn't grow up around extreme poverty. I grew up in a farming town where, you know, people got by and, and that was that.

26:11And I think moving to London opened my eyes in a lot of ways, like Finsbury Park, where I lived was rough around the edges, I would say. like it definitely had an edge to it and the circles that i was moving in no one had any money so we all sort of lived in these areas and uh someone was running a gig as i said i would play anywhere my friend cave was running a gig at a place called galleon's reach which is like east east east london in a warehouse at christmas time for a homeless charity called crisis and it's crisis at christmas and they basically house homeless people for four or five days they give them a place to sleep give them christmas lunch food and it's essentially just a charity outreach project for homeless people at christmas so i went and i played a gig for them and the girl who was dancing at the front sort of fascinated by and she'd get up and she'd sing with me and she'd put her arm around me and and blah blah blah and i spoke to the people that ran it afterwards and i was like oh tell me about her and they were like oh it's this girl angel and you know she's into this she's into this she's into this and it one of those things you just kind of like you don't even as an 18 year old you don't even really clock that when you're meeting someone you just you're meeting a human being you're not seeing the kind of like years of trauma and abuse and stuff that's behind that so i got very in my head about it and i was thinking i was on the train home like thinking a lot about it and i ended up sitting down and when i was on the train i was writing the lyrics like so in england they class different drugs in class categories so class c would be marijuana class b would be magic mushrooms and class a's were crack cocaine cocaine heroin uh all of that sort of stuff it was my play on words saying they say they say she's in the class a team stuck in her daydream been this way since 18 but lately a face cream all of that um so i wrote this song didn't really think much of it you know it's a it's a song about a sex worker addicted to drugs Like I didn't think that it would be a commercial breakthrough around the world going in at number 16 on billboard, let alone being played on radio.

28:18Like it's a pretty dark, heavy song. So I didn't really think much of it. And the more that I played it, it was like one of these things. It was kind of like a key card that got me accepted places where I shouldn't be accepted. I was, you know, playing poetry nights. I was playing comedy nights. I was playing rap nights. like really kind of heavy gigs where again did not fit on the bill stood out like a sore thumb but was playing this song that suddenly would like silence a room and have lyricists respect me yeah they say she's in the class 18 stuck in her daydream been this way since 18 but lately her face seems slowly sinking wasting crumbling like pastries they scream the worst things in life come free to us because we're just under the upper hand does she know no i never saw her never saw her and you don't know what's happened to her no i think it's very difficult to like keep track of

29:20Ed Sheeran:someone that does no fix to bode sure sure the full album which uh dropped a few months later goes to number five on the Billboard 200. Not long after that, you were the featured artist on Taylor Swift's Red album with the song Everything Has Changed, and then went on the tour with her, I know, as an opener. How did you two first cross paths? Because the way she's described it, I don't know if you feel the same way, but I know one quote that stood out to me was her saying at one point that you're the James Taylor to her Carole King. Yeah. And I think that's so great. And I just wonder, though, I mean, to have these two massively talented but also widely successful artists who pair to have hit it off, like, how did that begin?

30:07I was in Nashville. I was playing, I was opening up for Snow Patrol in Nashville. And Frank, who works with Taylor, had come down. And I just sort of mentioned, I just said, like, if she ever wants to write a song, I'm around. I knew that she knew my music. she'd written the lyrics to Lego house on her hand when she was playing in, I want to say Brisbane. Maybe it was Sydney. It was somewhere in Australia, but there was these photos going around of her with her, my lyrics on her, her hand. So I was like, if she ever wants to write and then we met and then we wrote. And then I don't know. I've, I've always felt like she's, she's kind of feels like a, uh, obviously we're the opposite sex and we're from different countries and cultures, but I feel very like, intertwined creatively with her and we had uh you know all this time on tour together where we sort of bonded as as friends and collaborators and performers and you know i do i do really agree with the uh the james taylor and and and carol king thing i do think that like you know we have we have very transient lives i'm i'm very much like settled kids in school like uh and then and And then touring, I do see her from time to time.

31:22And when we see, you just kind of lock back in and reconnect. And it's like no time has passed. It's very similar to a sibling. Yeah.

31:36Yeah.

31:57Ed Sheeran:And would you say that the, I guess, association on that tour, on that song, was that helpful in further kind of breaking America? Yeah, definitely. You can't really get bigger than her in America. I had done the Snow Patrol tour, and I'd done about like four or five tours of my own here. we you know i got to like an all right level here but it definitely that tour took me from theaters to arenas and yeah when i came back it was just arenas i think when you're playing to because we also we have such a with there's uh in the venn diagram of our music yeah there's a lot of crossover and a lot of you know being being able to be put in front of 12 000 fans every single night who are gonna like your music it just clicks yeah one thing that occurred to me though is I don't know specifically what the makeup of her setup was on that tour that you were on together, but I feel like it would not have been what became your kind of early signature, which is really just you and a loop pedal, right?

33:02Ed Sheeran:And I think a lot of people were skeptical that that could transfer, right, to huge venues. For people who may not know or may not really be up on their music terms or whatever. Can you just brief like on what a loop pedal is and how you've made it work where something as simple as a person in a loop pedal can enthrall obviously massive, massive audience? Well, so a loop pedal is basically, it's a machine that a guitar and a vocal can plug into and anything really, a keyboard or bass, anything. And you can record. And as soon as you then press play, it plays back and it loops and everything is live.

33:40and you essentially can create a backing track on the spot. And then at the end, you delete it and then you start another one. And no gig is the same. Every single gig is different. And I'd used one of these since I was about 14. I think the reason people were skeptical is it hasn't been done before. So obviously, when something hasn't been done before, a lot of people go, well, it won't work. And I think that the reason it did work was it was sort of paired with songs that were on the radio. So I was playing these big gigs with songs that people knew whilst looping and it was more like the energy of it as opposed to like the song like the sonic of it is it's quite rough around the edges it just it it is what it is it's not going to sound exactly like the recorded version but people don't come to live shows to hear the recorded version they come to hear the live show and i think people someone said to me very very early on when i was considering getting a band there was a friend of mine who's a rapper called wretch three two and he was just like man people just come to sing your songs like they don't care be there perform sing your songs and make sure it's entertaining.

34:41And I've just kind of always stuck with that.

34:43Ed Sheeran:Interesting. And as you reference people knowing your songs, that was obviously increasingly the case with Multiply. The next one is 2014. And in this case, just if it's okay with these albums, I'm just kind of picking a case study. Yeah, yeah, do you think? So with that one lead single is Sing, which Pharrell produced and backed you on, became your first number one hit in the UK, went to number 13 in the Billboard Hot 100. And I guess in that case, in the grand scheme of things, is the significance of that song in your body of work that this was kind of the beginning of the pivot from maybe more folk to more pop?

35:23Yeah, I actually, I think that that is one of the most important songs in my discography because it took me out of the pigeonhole. And I really think that that allowed me to be as experimental as I wanted without people raising eyebrows. I think when that song came out, eyebrows were raised. There was a toss up between there's a song on the album called One, which is the first song, and sing what do we put out as the first thing. Do we go traditional singer-songwriter? Do we go with the song with Pharrell? And I remember having a long dinner with Pharrell and him just being like, you've got to take the risk.

35:56You're going to spend your whole life being like, damn, I wish I took that risk. And yeah, I wouldn't say it's the biggest hit in my discography, but it opened up the door and i don't think songs like shape of you happen without that door being opened