Ed Sheeran

Story of Song

Ed Sheeran told the story of the song during a Spotify track-by-track: “‘Sing’ was from my first session with him, and when you work with Pharrell, he tends to push you: he wants you to do the best thing possible. So you don’t necessarily go for the first thing he plays you. It must have been on the seventeenth thing that he played me, and I had just dismissed everything. I just didn’t really get it. I don’t really get jazz chords and Pharrell’s very jazzy! He played me the beat, and I instantly dismissed it, it’s not for me. OK, fair enough, move on, but I had a guitar in my hand, and I started playing that riff and he just looked at me and said, ‘Do you know what you’re doing, man?’ I was like, ‘No!’, and then he puts back on the song and I said, ‘Oh, OK, but I still don’t want to do it’, but just said, ‘Man, just try it, it’s not going to kill you to try it!’ So he went off , he has three different studios in his building and has three different sessions going on at any one time and I wrote the top line. He came back in, we pieced it all together. I wrote probably seven different verses and three different choruses and then we just picked the best ones and stuck them together”.

Release date

Released on April 7, 2014.

Songwriter/s

Ed Sheeran – Pharrell Williams

Label

Atlantic – Asylum

Chart Rankings

US – 13

UK – 1

GERMANY – 7

‘Sing’ was streamed over 6.6 million times in Spain and Denmark alone. It topped the charts in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Scotland. It made it to the top charts in several countries such as Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Switzerland. The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) certified it platinum platinum and it was Sheeran’s first number one Australia. In the US, the song peaked at number 13 and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified it platinum for sales over 1.32 million copies. It topped the charts in the UK and was certified platinum for sales over 644,000 copies. ‘Sing’ was certified double platinum in Canada and Italy, platinum in New Zealand and Denmark, and Gold in Germany, Switzerland, and Spain.