Rise to Fame
He spent two and a half years without a fixed address, sleeping in the London Underground and under heating ducts near Buckingham Palace. The turnaround came when he bought a one-way ticket to LA and played an open-mic night where Jamie Foxx heard him, offered studio time, and let him sleep at his house. His self-released EP hit #2 on UK iTunes with no label and no ads. Atlantic Records signed him. + debuted at #1 in the UK in 2011, with The A Team video shot for £20. For someone who'd been sleeping rough two years before all this, the timeline was absurd.
In the Spotlight
Two copyright lawsuits in two years, and he walked out of both. He beat a $100M 'Thinking Out Loud' suit in 2023, with the jury out for under three hours, after he performed a guitar mash-up in court to show how common the chord progression was. He'd already won the UK 'Shape of You' case in 2022. The Divide Tour grossed $780 million, the highest-grossing tour on record when it wrapped. Subtract (2023) was rebuilt in a month of grief writing after his wife's cancer diagnosis and his best friend Jamal Edwards dying suddenly. The grief and the lawsuits didn't touch the numbers.
Side Notes
He's been without a smartphone since 2015, describing it as lifting 'a veil.' His childhood stutter was treated by his father buying him The Marshall Mathers LP, which he memorized and rapped along to until the fluency stuck. He has over 60 tattoos, including a Heinz ketchup bottle on his arm, and he personally tattooed Harry Styles with a padlock design. He owns a Nando's Black Card for free meals for life. His Suffolk estate has grown large enough that locals call it 'Sheeranville.' Between that and his minority stake in Ipswich Town FC, he's basically colonizing Suffolk.