When what has become Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All was first mooted, the beloved pop-star thought it would simply be about the making of his latest album – (Subtract, which will drop on Friday).
However, thanks to a truly traumatic start to 2022 involving a cancer diagnosis, a court case and the death of his best friend, the four-part, two-hour documentary (now streaming on Disney+) became a surprisingly raw and intimate look into his life outside of the public eye.
Stuff to Watch has had the opportunity to watch the quartet of themed, kind-of-chronological episodes (evocatively titled Love, Loss, Focus and Release) and offers up this selection of the most surprising and revealing Sheeran and wife Cherry Seaborn stories it contains.
The ones we believe most struck a chord – and truly resonate.
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* Singer Ed Sheeran announces engagement to childhood friend
He has always had his career mapped out
“I believe in speaking things into existence,” Sheeran says early on in the first episode, “so I planned my life to the nth degree – this is what I want to do and this is how it will happen”.
He started gigging from the age of 15 – hitting the streets with just a rucksack, loop pedal and a stack of CDs – and took things from there.
“I looked at all my peers and saw they were doing one show a week, so I did three shows a night and would play jazz and hip-hop nights, often using the shock value of me covering 50 Cent’s In the Club.”
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Ed Sheeran opens up about his life, career and the annus horribilis that was 2022 in The Sum of It All.
Subtract was always part of “the plan”
Sheeran says this was always the last of the five albums (+, X, ÷ and = being the other four) he was determined to make, right from the very start of his career. It was originally intended to be “the perfect acoustic album”, “the perfect singer-songwriter album”, but due to events of the past year, it has become “super-super personal” and, as he told the crowd when he debuted many of the songs at a special “church concert”, many are “not cheery” and “quite depressing”.
He first wrote Eyes Closed around five years ago
Currently sitting at No. 29 in the New Zealand Top 40, Sheeran says his latest single (the first tune off Subtract) actually originated as a break-up song he wrote while on the Divide Tour in 2018.
Now though, it’s a tribute to his pal Jamal Edwards, a music entrepreneur, DJ and founder of the online R&B/Hip-Hop platform SB.TV, whose own rise to fame coincided with Sheeran’s. “We were constantly egging each other on,” the singer recalls, adding that they were so close “his mother thought we were having a relationship when I moved into his bedroom [when Sheeran first came to London]”.
As Sum of It All shows, Sheeran struggled to process his grief after Edwards died suddenly on February 20 last year, eventually channelling it into reworking the lyrics for this tune. While he says it ‘is scary putting out my deepest, darkest thoughts to the world”, he now believes it will help him move on from things emotionally.
“As Jamal always told me ‘the goal is not to live forever – it’s to make something that will’….I don’t want my legacy to be Shape of You or Perfect, I want it to be that kids from Ipswich like me see that they can just do what they want to do.”
Eminem helped him cure his stutter
Reflecting before performing Stan with the man born Marshall Mathers at the latter’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction this past November, Sheeran reveals one of the reasons why joining the rapper onstage was such an honour and so exciting.
Born with a birthmark that required many sessions of laser removal, a mishap one-time involving the non-application of anaesthetic scream not only near blinded young Sheeran, it also left him with a stutter. What helped him overcome it? Learning all the words to every song on 1997’s Slim Shady EP.
Seaborn and Sheeran’s first official date didn’t exactly go smoothly
Having flirted with the idea of flirting when they were a year apart at the same high school, the pair had drifted apart, as his career started to take off and she headed to play field hockey at university in America. However, they kept in touch and, after a catching up at a few music industry events and hockey matches, decided to go boating together in Central Park.
“It was the hottest day of the summer, we were surrounded by tourists – and I was struggling to row,” Sheeran recalls. “Chez offered to assist…I said, ‘Chez, the last thing I need is people to take photos of you rowing me!’”
He also admits regretting offering to help her shift apartments in New York on another scorcher. “Really, I didn’t think there was going to be any more [us] after that weekend.”
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Cherry Seaborn and Ed Sheeran share plenty of secrets with the world in The Sum of It All.
He was wrong – but then he nearly botched the proposal as well…
Ever the planner, Sheeran had an engagement ring ready, which even boldly sported the date of his proposal engraved on it. Cue a fretful day where he kept on rushing Seaborn around, to the point where she was in midst of swearing at him when he got down on new knee.
“I said, Are you …joking?” and he said, ‘Please?’” she recounts.
Divided, but united by post
Knowing he was going to be away from Seaborn for some time on his Divide Tour (essentially off and on between March 2017 and August 2019), Sheeran came up with a sweet way of letting her know he was thinking about her.
“He sent a postcard home every week,” Seaborn says, “all saying exactly the same thing – Wish You Were Here. Weirdly, he was a man of few words.
“Well, I say all of them, all except the one from Florida that says – Wish You Were Her. That got me thinking.”
His favourite song is one he wrote for Seaborn
They’d only been dating a few weeks, but Sheeran decided to pen a love song while sitting in a London basement.
While he says he “got goosebumps” bringing Perfect to life, he does remember emailing it to Seaborn and thinking “this might be a bit much”.
Fortunately, it didn’t scare her off and, although he now says that “the feeling I got from writing it was worth way more than anything I got from it commercially”, he successfully predicted that Perfect would be the 2017 UK Christmas No. 1.
“Big Mike” is one of his best industry friends, but we know him by another name
He’s the man who Sheeran says has been there for him in some of the darkest times of his life. Someone who has proved invaluable in terms of helping him keep his sanity. They’ve collaborated together on tracks such as Take Me Back to London, Own It and an alternative version of Shape of You.
He calls Sheeran “Teddy”, he reciprocates with “Big Mike”, but, to us, he’s Stormzy. And he seems very good at dispensing sage advice.
“Make something worth being quiet for,” he tells his friend. “You have to be honest about where your life is, rather than writing things you think people want to hear.”
Kids too have seemingly always been part of his plan
“He wanted kids 15 years ago,” Seaborn says. “He would have been a teenage dad.”
However, she admits that given that he’s not always been practical, she wasn’t always sure that he’d cope with having to look after another human being.
For his part, Sheeran says he and Seaborn have agreed to the approach that they are just going to do everything they were always going to – “but with kids”.
He later confesses that the song Bad Habits was inspired by a time when Seaborn told him off for picking [oldest child] Lyra up out of her cot, mentions that he’s now godfather to James Blunt’s children and shares that “the only thing that comes close to the euphoria of writing a song is hugging my [three] girls [Seaborn, Lyra and youngest daughter Jupiter]”.
Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All is now available to stream on Disney+.
