Ed Sheeran

#1Watch Ed Sheeran build a song in a stadium in 2026 and there is something strange about the scale of it.

#2Everything around him is enormous. Screens tower over the stage. Lighting rigs, sound systems and a huge crew make the show possible. Tens of thousands of people are waiting for the next song.

#3Then Ed starts with something small.

#4He plays a guitar part and records it. He taps out a rhythm and loops that too. Another layer goes over it, then another, then his voice. Sounds made seconds earlier keep circling underneath him until one person begins to sound like several musicians at once.

#5His 2026 stadium tour is called the Loop Tour.

#6That name makes more sense when you go back about two decades, because Ed didn't originally get interested in looping as some grand plan for revolutionizing stadium concerts.

#7He was a teenager who saw another musician doing it and realized something much simpler.

#8He wouldn't need a band.

#9Ed grew up with a stutter.

#10He has described knowing exactly what he wanted to say while struggling to get the words out the way he wanted. Ordinary conversation could become something he had to think about.

#11Then his father John brought home an Eminem album.

#12Ed's uncle Jim had compared Eminem to a new Bob Dylan, which prompted John to buy *The Marshall Mathers LP* for his young son.

#13Ed became obsessed with it.

#14He repeatedly rapped along to Eminem's fast, densely packed verses and eventually knew the album almost front to back. Years later, Ed said that learning those rapid, melodic, percussive raps helped him overcome his stutter.

#15That doesn't make Eminem a medical treatment for stuttering. It's Ed's account of what happened to him.

#16But in his own story, the connection is striking: a kid who had trouble getting sentences out discovered that he could throw himself into extremely fast rap.

#17And rap wouldn't disappear when he became an acoustic singer-songwriter.

#18It would keep turning up at important moments in his life.

#19When Ed was a teenager, he saw musician Gary Dunne perform using live looping.

#20Dunne could play something, record it in real time and make it repeat. Then he could add another sound on top. And another.

#21Ed immediately noticed the practical advantage.

#22One musician could create a much bigger sound without having several people onstage.

#23Ed has joked that he wasn't exactly the coolest kid at the time and people weren't lining up to be in a band with him. A looper offered another solution.

#24Ed's side got in touch with Dunne, and around Ed's 15th birthday, Dunne showed him the basics of live looping.

#25There was no reason then to imagine this as the beginning of a stadium format.

#26It was simply a useful answer to a teenage problem.

#27If you don't have a band, learn how to make more sound by yourself.

#28Ed was already writing and recording songs before London became the center of his life.

#29What changed in his late teens was the sheer amount of time he spent performing them.

#30He chased small venues and open mics around London. In 2009, according to Ed, he played 312 shows.

#31Some had tiny audiences.

#32Some effectively had no audience at all.

#33Then he would go and find the next one.

#34After shows, he sold CDs himself. The money wasn't an abstract investment in a future music empire. It could mean food or a train ticket to wherever he needed to go next.

#35His accommodation was similarly unstable.

#36Ed spent long stretches moving between other people's sofas and floors. There were also occasional nights on the London Underground or outside when he didn't have somewhere to go.

#37That later became the simplified legend of "homeless Ed Sheeran," a description Ed himself has pushed back against. He wasn't continuously living on the street. Most of the time, he was sofa-surfing.

#38The more accurate picture is less dramatic but perhaps more revealing.

#39He didn't always know exactly where he would sleep.

#40He usually knew where his next gig was.

#41Producer Jake Gosling became one of the important people in this period.

#42Their early work didn't begin with a giant record-company budget.

#43Ed would make music.

#44He would play shows.

#45He would sell CDs and EPs.

#46Money from those shows could go back into recording.

#47Then there would be another release to take to another show.

#48Ed sometimes slept on the sofa at Jake's studio while they were working together.

#49So the sofa wasn't merely evidence that Ed had very little money. It was also part of the machinery of his early career. He could wake up in the same place where the next recordings were being made.

#50Before a major label gave Ed a system, he had already built a crude one himself:

#51gig, sell, record, release, repeat.

#52What he still needed was a way to reach people who weren't already hanging around London's acoustic venues.

#53That came from somewhere unexpected.

#54Ed was hardly the only young man in London carrying a guitar and writing songs.

#55He has talked about feeling that acoustic singer-songwriters could begin to sound similar to one another. His own musical interests, however, didn't fit neatly inside that scene.

#56He loved rap.

#57He could sing, rap and beatbox, sometimes within the same performance.

#58That helped bring him toward Britain's grime scene and toward Jamal Edwards.

#59Jamal had built SBTV, an online platform that was becoming a home for grime MCs and emerging British artists.

#60Then this red-haired singer-songwriter turned up with an acoustic guitar.

#61He played.

#62He sang.

#63He rapped.

#64He beatboxed.

#65In a conventional singer-songwriter setting, that combination could make Ed difficult to categorize.

#66On SBTV, being difficult to categorize made him interesting.

#67Jamal put him in front of the camera. For an acoustic variation on SBTV's F64 format, Ed performed "You Need Me, I Don't Need You".

#68The performance traveled online.

#69Suddenly, the guitar-playing singer was reaching people far beyond the audience he had been collecting one tiny gig at a time.

#70It would be easy to turn Jamal into a convenient character who uploads one important video and disappears from the story.

#71That isn't what happened.

#72While Ed was moving between gigs and places to sleep, he also stayed at Jamal's home, later remembering that he could be there two or three days in a week.

#73The person helping expose Ed's music online was also becoming his friend.

#74One day Jamal was behind the camera, giving an unusual acoustic singer access to his audience.

#75Another night, he could be giving that same singer somewhere to sleep.

#76The SBTV video and the sofa belonged to the same relationship.

#77Meanwhile Ed was moving deeper into collaborations with grime artists including Wiley, Devlin and P Money.

#78They already had audiences that Ed didn't.

#79On *No.5 Collaborations Project*, those worlds began crossing over. Online attention grew. Radio exposure followed. Listeners who might never have gone looking for an acoustic singer-songwriter were now hearing Ed.

#80And all of this was happening before a major record company had turned him into a star.

#81Record labels hadn't universally ignored Ed, but they hadn't exactly been fighting over him either.

#82Ed has recalled being told that his songs weren't obvious hits and that his red hair and build didn't make him an easy conventional pop-star proposition.

#83So he kept doing what he had already been doing.

#84Then *No.5 Collaborations Project* began climbing the iTunes rankings much faster than expected.

#85His manager Stuart Camp later remembered Ed calling when it had reached somewhere around No. 36.

#86Ed wanted a screenshot.

#87At that point, even being there seemed extraordinary enough that he wanted proof of it. He didn't expect the number to keep moving.

#88It did.

#89And then the calls from the music business started coming.

#90That order matters.

#91The clean version of Ed Sheeran's story isn't that the industry spotted an unknown genius and then introduced him to an audience.

#92He had already spent years assembling the audience through hundreds of performances, self-released music, online videos and collaborations.

#93The audience moved first. The industry's confidence followed.

#94Ed hadn't waited to be discovered.

#95He had made himself increasingly difficult not to notice.

#96Only a few years earlier, Ed had experienced gigs where almost nobody showed up.

#97By 2011, the problem was beginning to reverse.

#98Crowds at small shows could become too large for the spaces booked to contain them.

#99The contrast was almost absurd.

#100Before, there had been a stage and no audience.

#101Now there could be an audience and not enough stage.

#102A major-label career followed, and the scale changed rapidly from there.

#103But that created a different problem.

#104The guitar, rhythmic playing, rapping and looping had developed in rooms where Ed could see almost everybody.

#105What happens to that kind of performance when the room becomes a stadium?

#106By the time Ed prepared to headline Wembley Stadium in 2015, people were openly wondering whether the format could work.

#107A stadium isn't a large pub.

#108The farthest spectators can be hundreds of feet away. Huge touring acts normally arrive with bands, elaborate staging and armies of production staff.

#109Ed was nervous too.

#110But the answer wasn't simply to turn him into a conventional stadium frontman with an enormous band behind him.

#111Instead, the technology around his performance expanded.

#112The essential action remained recognizable.

#113Play something.

#114Loop it.

#115Add rhythm.

#116Add another layer.

#117Sing over it.

#118Get the crowd to become part of the song.

#119Over time, the simple looping equipment became a custom system capable of handling a vastly more complicated show. Sound engineers could control the layers. Later tours placed Ed at different positions on huge stages while keeping the looping system accessible to him.

#120Ed eventually described it neatly: as they went from bars to stadiums, the pedal had grown with them.

#121That may be the best explanation of what happened.

#122He didn't make a stadium behave like a tiny pub.

#123He scaled the language he had learned in tiny pubs until it could survive inside a stadium.

#124There is a catch to calling an Ed Sheeran stadium concert a one-man show.

#125The music can still be centered on one performer, but a modern stadium show requires an enormous number of other people.

#126One incident during the Mathematics Tour captured the contradiction perfectly.

#127Its stage was designed so Ed could perform in the middle of a stadium and reach audiences in every direction. At an early show, part of the rotating system failed.

#128The show still had to happen.

#129So crew members underneath the stage manually helped turn it.

#130Above them was Ed, looking like one man commanding an enormous stadium.

#131Below him were people physically moving the machinery that allowed the one-man show to exist.

#132That's the more accurate version of his stadium evolution.

#133Ed didn't literally do everything alone.

#134The musical center stayed unusually individual while the invisible team and technology around it became enormous.

#135Looking backward, it can seem inevitable that Ed and a loop pedal would remain together forever.

#136It wasn't.

#137After years of relentless touring, Ed began deliberately stopping.

#138In 2015, he stepped away from his phone and social media for a period. The internet had once been essential to getting his music heard. Fame had turned constant connection into something exhausting. He said he felt as though he was seeing the world through a screen instead of through his own eyes.

#139After the enormous Divide Tour ended in 2019, he stopped again.

#140His life was changing. He had married Cherry Seaborn, and questions about family and how much of the year he wanted to spend touring mattered differently now.

#141Around that period, he even talked as though the solo loop-pedal touring format might have reached its end.

#142That matters because it changes the meaning of what came later.

#143Ed didn't spend two decades blindly following a formula he had chosen at 15.

#144At one point, he could imagine leaving it behind.

#145During Ed's early career, effort could solve an astonishing number of problems.

#146No audience?

#147Book another show.

#148No money?

#149Sell more CDs.

#150No bed?

#151Find another sofa.

#152Keep moving and another possibility might appear.

#153Then 2022 brought problems that didn't respond to repetition.

#154While Cherry was pregnant, doctors found a tumor.

#155Jamal Edwards died suddenly.

#156Ed was also dealing with the strain of copyright litigation.

#157These events unfolded over a period rather than in one dramatic instant, but together they shook him deeply. Music he had been planning changed direction, and the fear and grief of that period became central to *Subtract*.

#158Jamal's death was particularly tangled up with Ed's own history.

#159The friend he had lost was one of the people who had pointed a camera at him before most of the world cared to look.

#160In 2023, Ed returned to an SBTV format.

#161He stood inside Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea, the football club Jamal had loved.

#162Then Ed performed an F64 about his friend.

#163Think about what had changed since the earlier SBTV years.

#164Back then, Ed had been a little-known singer with a guitar, rapping into Jamal's camera.

#165Jamal was there.

#166The video helped introduce Ed to another world of listeners.

#167More than a decade later, Ed was now one of the biggest touring artists on the planet. He was standing in front of an SBTV camera again.

#168This time, Jamal wasn't behind it.

#169Rap had appeared when Ed was a child struggling with speech.

#170It appeared when an unknown acoustic singer needed a way into a different music scene.

#171And after he lost one of the closest friends from that period, rap appeared again as a way to speak about him.

#172None of that had been designed as a perfect circle.

#173Life rarely works that neatly.

#174But the same musical language kept finding its way back.

#175In 2019, Ed could imagine that his solo loop-pedal touring days might be ending.

#176In 2026, he's touring stadiums again.

#177And this time he put the word right on the poster:

#178Loop Tour.

#179The North American run includes venues such as MetLife Stadium, continuing the kind of stadium-scale touring that would have been almost impossible to imagine during the years when Ed was selling CDs after tiny London gigs.

#180There is no need to pretend every date everywhere instantly sells out.

#181The remarkable part is simpler.

#182After all the records, pauses and changes in his life, Ed can still take this performance language into stadiums.

#183Almost everything around it has changed.

#184There are huge screens now.

#185There is sophisticated lighting and sound.

#186There are large crews.

#187Other musicians can join parts of the modern show.

#188The teenager hunting for a sofa has become a husband and father who thinks carefully about how touring fits around a family.

#189Yet when Ed begins building a song, something very old remains visible.

#190He makes a sound.

#191He loops it.

#192He puts another sound over it.

#193Then another.

#194Then he sings.

#195And he asks tens of thousands of people to join in as though he were still trying to win over the handful standing in front of him at a small gig.

#196As a teenager, Ed Sheeran saw Gary Dunne using a looper and liked the idea for an extremely practical reason.

#197He wouldn't need a band.

#198More than two decades later, that little solution had become the name of his stadium tour.

#199Ed didn't become a pop star by removing every part of himself that once seemed difficult to market.

#200The red-haired acoustic singer who rapped, beatboxed and built songs alone didn't disappear.

#201He just kept making that strange combination bigger until the whole stadium could recognize it.

#202Why did Jamal Edwards, who built his name filming grime MCs, put an unknown singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar on SBTV? That unlikely meeting didn't just connect Ed Sheeran to a new audience. It became the beginning of a friendship that would follow both men far beyond one viral performance.