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Ed Sheeran has been sharing a veritable treasure trove of old images and messages discovered on his old phone, as he prepares to release a new song inspired by the find.
Among the photos is one of a jar of jam gifted to him by his friend and fellow pop star, Taylor Swift, that shows her taking a swipe at her old sparring partner, Kanye West.
“Yo Ed,” Swift wrote on the homemade label. “I’m really happy 4 you and I’m gonna let u finish but this is the best jam of all time – T.”
Fans have immediately assumed Swift was joking about West’s notorious stunt in 2009, when he crashed the MTV Awards stage and interrupted a 19-year-old Swift as she accepted the award for Best Female Video.
“I’ma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time,” he declared.
West was widely condemned for his actions, while Swift has clearly been able to make light of the incident since.
“It was pretty good jam,” Sheeran wrote in the caption of his post.
The Grammy-winning British singer-songwriter, 34, told fans in an Instagram post from a new account, “teddysoldphone”, how he got rid of his phone in 2015 and moved over to emails.
“I just turned my phone off December ‘15 and that was it,” he wrote on Tuesday 29 April. “When I got sued, the judge ordered me to give up my old devices to the other side’s lawyers, to look through messages, emails, voicenotes, videos etc, to see if there [was] anything on there to help their case.”
The lawsuit in question was likely the “Thinking Out Loud” plagiarism case, in which a New York jury ruled that Sheeran’s hit song did not copy Marvin Gaye’s soul classic “Let’s Get It On”.
Sheeran had vowed to quit music if the jury decided in favour of the heirs of Ed Townsend, the songwriter who composed the 1973 anthem with Gaye.
“In the process, I switched on my old phone,” Sheeran explained. “The first message was from my friend @jamaledwards, who had recently passed away. The second was from my ex girlfriend who I hadn’t been in contact with for years. The third was a family member I haven’t spoken to in a decade. And so on.
“It felt like a time capsule, a time of life that I was in, and living at that time in 2015. Turning it on really spun me out, I found myself scrolling messages and conversations with people who are no longer here. I found myself crying at messages to friends who are now dead, who I won’t get to speak to again. I found old photos of me with people I was so close to then, but we’ve lost touch since.”
He described the experience as “an emotional journey” that inspired him to write the song “Old Phone” on his phone at 2am while jet-lagged in India, where he was finishing his forthcoming album, Play.
“It feels like a song that should’ve been on my debut album, but also a song I couldn’t have written until I experienced real-life things happening to me,” Sheeran wrote.
“It makes me emotional to sing, I hope it finds some emotion in you too. Maybe it makes you switch on your old phone and have a look at where you were a decade ago too. Whatever it does, I’m glad I wrote it.”
“Old Phone” will be released at 4pm BST on Thursday 1 May.
English (US) ·