- British acoustic pop singer, songwriter and guitarist born in 1991, from Halifax, West Yorkshire England.
- Sheeran learned to play the guitar as a child, and started writing music in high school. He started recording his songs when he was 13. He burned 14 songs into a CD called Spinning Man – he estimates that he made 20 copies, and that he still has 19 of them.
- He released EPs in 2005, 2006 and 2007. In 2008, he moved to London and started playing in small clubs. Other artists were impressed with him, and he toured and collaborated with them. He posted performance videos of himself on the internet, increasing his exposure.
- In 2009 and 2010, 4 EPs were released that actually charted in the UK. At this time, he was still independent, with no record label to promote him. In January 2011, he released another independent EP, No. 5 Collaborations Project, which reached #2 on the ITunes chart without any promotion. In April that year, he was signed to a record deal.
- That month, he appeared on the popular British music TV show Later…With Jools Holland and performed his debut single, The A Team. The single was released as a download 6 weeks later, and Sheeran’s debut album containing the song, titled + (read as “plus”), was released in September 2011. It was a big success, selling over 4 million copies worldwide. In the UK, it topped the album chart, and in the U.S. it peaked at #5. Six singles were released – they all were top 25 in the UK, though only The A Team and Lego House charted in the U.S.
- Other artists began to ask for collaborations with him. In 2012, he co-wrote and provided vocals to Taylor Swift’s Everything Has Changed single, and he provided 2 songs to One Direction’s second studio album, including Little Things, which hit #1 in the UK.
- In 2013, he headlined for Taylor Swift during Swift’s concert tour in North America. He also provided the song I See Fire, used in the end credits of the film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
- His second studio album, x (read as “multiply”), was released in 2014. Sheeran had become a star – the album has sold nearly 10 million copies worldwide, with over 4 million in the U.S. Four singles hit top 20 in the U.S. – Sing, Don’t, Thinking Out Loud, and Photograph, with Thinking Out Loud peaking at #2, and staying there for 8 weeks (Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson kept it out of the #1 spot). The single earned him 2 Grammy awards. Spotify named Sheeran as the most streamed artist in 2014, and x was the second highest selling album worldwide in 2015 (behind Adele’s 25).
- Sheeran’s most recent studio album was released in March 2017. Titled ÷ (read as “divide”), it debuted at #1 in all major markets. Its first week sales in the UK were the largest for a male solo artist of all time. Prior to the album release, 2 singles were released on the same day in January – Shape of You and Castle On the Hill. Spotify reported that there were 13 million streams of the songs in a single day, the most ever. On the Billboard Hot 100 chart, Shape of You debuted at #1 and Castle On the Hill at #6 – the first time ever that an artist had 2 songs debut in the Top 10 at the same time.
- It’s safe to say that Ed Sheeran is on a roll. Shape of You is infectiously popular. It has been viewed on YouTube over 5.1 billion times – the third most watched video on YouTube of all time. Here it is…
PERFECT is really a very very very sweet song by Ed Sheeran recently, new of my repeating song list~