8/23/2023 0 Comments Bad habits song coverIf you were to speak to any sort of muso, ‘Oh, I love my left-of-center music,’ I’m the punchline to what bad pop music is.”Īt some point long ago, he decided not to worry about it. And I’m still kind of not taken seriously. “Everyone saw me as a joke, and no one thought I could do it.” The way he sees it, he alchemized all that contempt and doubt into artistic fuel. “I spent so long with people laughing about me making music,” he says. But when he first started coming into London as a teenager, toting his acoustic guitar and loop pedal from gig to gig, trying to get signed, he’d hear it right to his face. Sheeran encounters hostility almost exclusively online these days, when it reaches him at all. In his mind, he says, “there is a lot of, like, ‘Why do people care whether I feel this way or that way?’ ” First of all, he imagines people seeing it through the highly unsympathetic lens of “Rich Pop Star Feels Sad.” And then there’s the fact of the particular pop star he is. He’ll end up revealing it all, maybe more than he planned, but he’s wary of the world’s reactions. In keeping with the album’s themes, Sheeran has “super-heavy” stuff - death, illness, grief, depression, addiction - to talk about this week, in the most extensive interviews he’s done in at least five years. He is, himself, vaccinated, but has managed to contract Covid at least seven times, thanks to constant travel and the kids.) I don’t want to say anything bad about him,” says Sheeran, who started playing guitar after seeing a “Layla” performance on TV. (Don’t bother trying to get his take on Clapton’s anti-vax turn, by the way: “I love Eric. Sheeran’s hero and friend Eric Clapton got him into serious watch collecting, as he did for John Mayer, and today’s wristwear is a Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar model that seems to be worth at least six figures. See Taylor Swift Bring Out Aaron Dessner and Gracie Abrams at Cincinnati Show “Yesterday,” Sheeran says, “we cooked, we watched an episode of The Simpsons, went to bed.” Sheeran and Seaborn have transplanted their family life to the far side of the world for a couple of months while he commutes to his stadium shows, and there’s an eerie normality to his offstage existence here, as if he’s swapped lives with a prosperous Kiwi dentist. The house is a sleek open-plan renovation of a hundred-year-old frame, square in the middle of an upscale suburban block, with blond local-wood floors, everything painted paper-white, and a $12,000 monthly mortgage payment for whoever owns it. Sheeran’s wife of four years, Cherry Seaborn, and their two daughters - Lyra, who’s two, and Jupiter, eight months old - are hanging out inside. It’s a mid-February afternoon, late summer in this hemisphere. “I was the butt of jokes before this,” he says, “and I’m the butt of jokes now, and it’s not necessarily just my music.” In those eyes, he’s a ginger-haired interloper, a vaguely hobbit-y mortal who ascended into the realm of pop godhood via some kind of cosmic error, and then refused to leave. He’s one of the top five most-streamed artists ever on Spotify, a statistic that doesn’t even include his “hobby,” all the hits he’s written for other artists, from Justin Bieber to BTS. He’s the first dance at weddings, the last dance at prom, the voice you hear as you drag your suitcase off a plane.īut Sheeran is convinced that, in certain quarters, his achievements and talents - his elastic voice, his endless trove of hooks, his freaky, human-playlist capacity for cross-genre metamorphosis, lately extended to Afropop, EDM, and reggaeton - don’t seem to register. His last tour was the highest-grossing of all time, until his mentor, Elton John, surpassed it this one, somehow slated to last five full years, may well reclaim the title. Later this week, he’ll play to some 100,000 people over two shows here. That’s why he’s 11,000 miles from home right now, in the fenced-off, tree-lined backyard of a rented bungalow in Auckland, New Zealand, lounging in the shade his complexion demands (“I live in the shade ”), under blue-gray skies. Sheeran is, on the one hand, unquestionably among the 21st century’s very biggest global pop superstars. The state of being that guy, at the least the public version of him, is a paradoxical one. “When you say in your office, ‘I’m gonna go and interview Ed Sheeran,’ you must get sneers. “I’m not an idiot,” he says, early in our acquaintance. In case there’s any doubt, Ed Sheeran is well aware of the fact that he’s … Ed Sheeran.
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