Ed Sheeran has finished working his way though mathematics symbols with his albums Plus, Multiply, Divide, Subtract, and Equals. Now, he’s moving on to the buttons on a walkman. During a recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the musician revealed the title of his forthcoming album, Play, the first in a new string of symbols.
“When I was like 18, I had an idea for like 10 albums,” Sheeran explained. With the first five done, he’s chipping away at Play, followed by Rewind, Fast-Forward, and Stop. “I’m kind of a bit obsessed with Tarantino, and I heard he was doing 10 films, and he’s got his side projects like Grindhouse. So I’m like, I want to do my 10 and, every now and then, do a side project here and there.”
Sheeran’s approach to unveiling Play has been fairly off-the-cuff, so far. He dropped the album title of Fallon and premiered the new song “Azizam” during a surprise appearance in New Orleans’ French Quarter. “I was working with this producer, Ilya, who is Persian, and we were creating a lot of music and he just suggested we do something within the Persian culture,” he explained. “We’ve actually done a full version in Farsi, as well.”
In continuing this trend of impromptu revelations, Sheeran partially premiered a song titled “Old Phone” during the interview. “I was in that lawsuit a couple of years ago and in the lawsuit, they order you to give up all your old devices,” he said. “So I handed everything in, but I moved to a tablet in 2015 just on e-mail. I switched my phone off 2015 and left it in a box. And then, when I went through that lawsuit, I got my phone out again and had to go through like all the voicenotes and the pictures and all that stuff for the lawyers.”
He described the experience as “going into a time machine.” When he went through the phone, he encountered text messages from two friends who had since died, an argument with an ex-girlfriend, and correspondence from an estranged family member he hadn’t spoken to in a decade. “I was scrolling down,” Sheeran continued. “It really, really spun me out.” When Fallon whipped out an acoustic guitar, Sheeran previewed the song, which sticks pretty close to the way he described it.
“I found my old phone today/In a box that I had hidden away/Nostalgia trying to lead me astray/Maybe I’ll unwrite some wrongs,” he sang. “I charge the battery again/Combinations cause my password had changed/Opened up and saw familiar names/Now I wonder where they’ve gone/Conversations with my dead friends/Messages from all my exes/I kind of think that this was best left/There in the past where it belongs/ I feel an overwhelming sadness/Of all the friends I do not have left/Seeing how my family has fractured/Growing up and moving on/I found my old phone today.”
While Sheeran didn’t technically take the stage for an official Fallon performance, he did treat the audience to a version of “Shape of You,” as well. During one segment, the singer and the host built the song out on a looping station. Discussing the origin on the hit single, Sheeran said: “Every single album that I’ve ever done, I’ve always gone, on the side, ‘Let’s try and write a song that we can pitch to Rihanna.’ Like, ‘Love Yourself,’ actually, the one I did for Bieber, was originally for Rihanna, in mind.
Like, Oh, we should do something for her.’ I promise you, there’ll be so many songwriters out there that their best song came from trying to write a Rihanna song.”
Sheeran recently told Variety he would be “getting back into big pop” with the new album for the “first time in a long time.”
From Rolling Stone US
