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Ed Sheeran Confesses: Tears, Trauma, and Those Bad Habits

By Brian Hiatt

Brian Hiatt

I n case there’s any doubt, Ed Sheeran is well aware of the fact that he’s … Ed Sheeran.

“I’m not an idiot,” he says, early in our acquaintance. “When you say in your office, ‘I’m gonna go and interview Ed Sheeran,’ you must get sneers. I’ve always been that guy.” 

But Sheeran is convinced that, in certain quarters, his achievements and talents — his elastic voice, his endless trove of hooks, his freaky, human-playlist capacity for cross-genre metamorphosis, lately extended to Afropop, EDM, and reggaeton — don’t seem to register. In those eyes, he’s a ginger-haired interloper, a vaguely hobbit-y mortal who ascended into the realm of pop godhood via some kind of cosmic error, and then refused to leave. “I was the butt of jokes before this,” he says, “and I’m the butt of jokes now, and it’s not necessarily just my music.”

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Lyra, who’s emerged for some snuggle time, is eyeing a blue plastic wading pool on the Shire-green lawn. “As soon as Daddy’s finished the interview, I’ll go splashing with you,” Sheeran promises.

Again, he gets it. “I am a nerd,” he says. “I love Lord of the Rings. I love Pokemon. I love fucking Lego and Warhammer, and yeah, I’m not meant to be considered cool.” But he’s long since ascended to an elite level of geekery. When he was very young, he admits, he saw Pikachu et al. as his “friends”; now he’s the guy who gets asked to write a song (the Coldplay-ish anthem “Celestial”) for a new Pokemon game. He once assembled both a Lego Death Star and a Millennium Falcon with a 1D-era Harry Styles, and cameoed in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, as well as, controversially, in Season Seven of Game of Thrones . He’s been pals with Lord of the Rings auteur Peter Jackson since writing a song for 2013’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The other week, in Wellington, he watched North by Northwest in Jackson’s home screening room, with fellow New Zealand resident James Cameron and family also in attendance.

With Sheeran’s new album, – (pronounced Subtract ), due May 5, he’s in sudden danger of achieving a new brand of musical coolness, thanks to some of his most unadorned and emotive songwriting, paired with the chiaroscuro inventiveness of production by the National’s Aaron Dessner . Sheeran knows there’s a chance critics might actually like this one, which kind of scares him: “I’m worried about that, because all my biggest records, they hate.” 

He’s sitting cross-legged and shoeless on the gray cushion of an outdoor couch, wearing a crisp white T-shirt, black shorts from the Italian brand Stone Island, and white tube socks. His arms are a rainbow riot of tattoos, quotes in Gaelic and Dwarvish among them. He’s got a scruffy, reddish beard going, and his longish hair sticks out of a baseball cap from Lowden Guitars, a high-end acoustic-guitar manufacturer. When he was a kid, he dreamed of playing one; now he’s a collaborator on a signature model.

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In keeping with the album’s themes, Sheeran has “super-heavy” stuff — death, illness, grief, depression, addiction — to talk about this week, in the most extensive interviews he’s done in at least five years. He’ll end up revealing it all, maybe more than he planned, but he’s wary of the world’s reactions. First of all, he imagines people seeing it through the highly unsympathetic lens of “Rich Pop Star Feels Sad.” And then there’s the fact of the particular pop star he is. In his mind, he says, “there is a lot of, like, ‘Why do people care whether I feel this way or that way?’ ” 

Sheeran encounters hostility almost exclusively online these days, when it reaches him at all. But when he first started coming into London as a teenager, toting his acoustic guitar and loop pedal from gig to gig, trying to get signed, he’d hear it right to his face. “I spent so long with people laughing about me making music,” he says. “Everyone saw me as a joke, and no one thought I could do it.” The way he sees it, he alchemized all that contempt and doubt into artistic fuel. “And I think that’s still the drive. There’s still this need to prove myself. And I’m still kind of not taken seriously. If you were to speak to any sort of muso, ‘Oh, I love my left-of-center music,’ I’m the punchline to what bad pop music is.”

At some point long ago, he decided not to worry about it. “I mean, mate, when I wrote ‘Perfect’ and ‘Thinking Out Loud,’ I remember being like, ‘Oh, these are a bit cheesy,’ ” he says. “But at the time being like, ‘I don’t know if I care.’ And they became the biggest ballads in the world that year. And you’re like, ‘Well, people must connect with cheese, then!’ ”

Someone on Twitter recently accused Sheeran of making “sex anthems for boring people,” a critique he needs only a millisecond to contemplate. “ 150 million boring people, by the way,” he shoots back, referring, loosely, to his total album sales, a figure that clearly hovers close to the surface of his mind. “I think I’m quite meme-able. Have you seen the meme of me when I’m queuing up at a record store in my own T-shirt with a bag that says “÷” on it? And it says, ‘Why does Ed Sheeran look like he’s queuing up to meet Ed Sheeran?’ I think it’s because I am quite quote-unquote ‘ordinary-looking.’ I look like someone’s older brother’s mate who came back from college and works in a pizza shop.”

In truth, at this moment, with his 32nd birthday about to hit, he looks less ordinary than ever. The beard lends him a certain glamour, and he’s lean enough these days to expose sharp cheekbones he credits to an hour of weightlifting a day, pointing to a set of dumbbells on the porch. There’s a river’s worth of feeling in his deep-blue eyes, recently lasered out of nearsightedness, a striking contrast to all that red fuzz.

“ Babies love Ed, because he’s got an unusual face,” says Seaborn, who has warm hazel eyes under her caramel-colored eyeglass frames. She exudes intelligence and a certain steadiness, and also happens to be the subject of a worshipful song — “Shape of You” — that’s been streamed billions of times. (She’ll tell some of her story in May 3’s documentary series, Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All, streaming on Disney+.)

Sheeran wouldn’t mind making new fans with Subtract, but he doesn’t need your grudging acceptance. “Someone who’s never liked my music ever? And sees me as the punchline to a joke? For him to suddenly be like, ‘Oh, you’re not as shit as I thought you were?’ That doesn’t mean anything.”

ED SHEERAN IS CRYING AGAIN, and he’s glad. It’s nearly been a year, and he doesn’t want the pain to fade quite yet. “I don’t want to get over it,” he says. “I would hate to talk about it, but not feel …” His eyes and his face are equally red now, and he can’t quite get the words out. 

On Feb. 20 of last year, Jamal Edwards, one of the U.K.’s most prominent young music entrepreneurs, died suddenly at age 31, of a cardiac arrhythmia brought on by cocaine use. He was Sheeran’s best friend, and the artist believes he owes Edwards his career, thanks to cred-establishing appearances on his influential YouTube channel SBTV. Edwards’ final Instagram post was a tribute to his old friend. “Happy Birthday to the OG, Ed. Blessed to have you in my life brother. You know you’ve been mates a long time when you lose count on the years! Keep smashing it & inspiring us all G!”

The two friends had an easy chemistry, as demonstrated in an old YouTube clip where Sheeran and Edwards trade lines from the grime track “Burst Da Pipe,” both of them cracking up. “People assumed that we were lovers,” Sheeran rapped on a recent tribute to his friend, “F64.” “But we’re brothers in arms.” “That was a big rumor in the industry,” Sheeran says. “And I don’t think anyone thought that I knew the rumor. But I get it, man. I lived in his room!”

When he was 18 and had no place to live in London, he crashed for the night at Edwards’ house, and ended up staying for “God knows how long. Like, I get why people would think that. We used to go on holidays together.” The night before he learned of Edwards’ death, Sheeran was out to dinner with Swift and Joe Alwyn, exchanging texts with Edwards about plans to shoot a video the next day. “Twelve hours later,” Sheeran says, “he was dead.”

I don’t know any old rockers who aren’t alcoholics or sober,” Sheeran says. “And I didn’t want to be either.

Edwards’ death shattered him, sent him spiraling. “My best friend died,” he says, tearing up for the first time in our discussions. “And he shouldn’t have done.” He found himself in his latest bout of what he quietly knew to be depression. “I’ve always had real lows in my life,” he says. “But it wasn’t really till last year that I actually addressed it.” 

He first experienced it in elementary school, a period that’s sometimes played for laughs in chronicles of his life, but turns out to have been deeply traumatizing. “I went to a really, really sport-orientated primary school,” he says. “I had bright red hair, big blue glasses, a stutter. I couldn’t play the sport because I had a perforated eardrum. You’re just singled out for being different at that point. I’ve kind of blocked out a lot of it, but I have a real hang up about that. I think it plays into wanting to be on a stage and have people like you and stuff.” 

In the wake of Edwards’ death — and then, on top of everything else, the passing of another friend, Australian cricket star Shane Warne, in early March — Sheeran started experiencing a feeling he’d silently suffered through before. “I felt like I didn’t want to live anymore,” he says, his voice steady. “And I have had that throughout my life.… You’re under the waves drowning. You’re just sort of in this thing. And you can’t get out of it.” Those thoughts were bad enough, but shame arrived as their companion. They seemed “selfish,” he says, “especially as a father. I feel really embarrassed about it.”

It was Seaborn who figured out what was going on, and told Sheeran he needed help. For the first time in his life, he started seeing a therapist. “No one really talks about their feelings where I come from,” he says. “People think it’s weird getting a therapist in England.… I think it’s very helpful to be able to speak with someone and just vent and not feel guilty about venting. Obviously, like, I’ve lived a very privileged life. So my friends would always look at me like, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad.’ ”

As he talks, Sheeran keeps pulling at a loose silver chain on his right wrist. He spent most of last year wearing two rubber bracelets. One was from Edwards’ funeral, the other, bearing the slogan “Don’t fuck up,” belonged to yet another lost friend, the Australian music exec Michael Gudinski, who died in 2021. On Christmas, Seaborn gave Sheeran the new jewelry, with Jupiter’s and Lyra’s names engraved inside. On New Year’s Day, Sheeran made the switch. “It felt symbolic,” he says, “to take off those bracelets and put on one for my family.”

SHEERAN’S OTHER FORM OF THERAPY was his usual one: writing songs. Since 2011, Sheeran has been executing his plan for a cycle of albums with titles based on mathematical symbols, and Subtract, now the last of those five releases, was always in the mix. The idea was a stripped-down singer-songwriter album, returning him to his earliest roots, and he’d spent more than a decade on it, “sculpting this perfect thing.” By early last year, it was ready to go. But the version of Subtract he’s putting out in May isn’t that album at all.

In late 2021, Swift’s matchmaking led to Sheeran and Dessner sitting down for a sushi dinner in New York. Dessner recalls telling Sheeran that he “would love to hear him in a more vulnerable, more sort of elemental way.” Not long after that conversation, Dessner did his thing, sending Sheeran fully arranged instrumental beds that just needed vocal melodies and lyrics.

In the midst of Sheeran’s month from hell, he started writing over the tracks. “I wasn’t really around a guitar,” he says. “But I had these instrumentals, and I would write to them — in the backs of cars or planes or whatever. And then it got done. And that was the record. It was all very, very, very fast.”

The opening track, “Boat,” evokes one of Sheeran’s early heroes, the singer-songwriter Damien Rice, in its starkness, with Dessner’s textured chords swelling beneath acoustic strumming. (Sheeran wrote it over a piano-and-drums bed created by Dessner, but reworked it as a raw guitar song.) “They say that all scars heal, but I know maybe I won’t,” Sheeran sings, sounding more plaintive than you’ve ever heard him. “The waves won’t break my boat.” On another ballad, “Life Goes On,” Sheeran sings directly of Edwards: “Life goes on with you gone, I suppose/I sink like a stone.”

The lovely midtempo track “Dusty,” propelled by ticking synthetic hi-hats, is lighter, capturing an epiphany Sheeran experienced during a morning ritual of listening to vinyl with Lyra — in this case, Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis. “I’m going through that time of turbulence and massive lows,” Sheeran says, “but then waking up in the morning and having a joyous morning with a beautiful girl. It’s such a weird juxtaposition to go to bed crying and wake up smiling with your daughter.”

“Eyes Closed,” the first single, is built around a pinging pizzicato riff that builds to an octave-jumping chorus as big as anything in Sheeran’s catalog: “I’m dancing with my eyes closed/’Cause everywhere I look I still see you.” It’s a rewrite of a more straightforward pop song Sheeran had on hand, a more generic breakup narrative. Now it speaks directly to his traumas and their aftermath: “I pictured this month a little bit different/No one is ever ready.”

Sheeran has five more albums in mind using another category of symbols, one he’s not ready to share, at least on the record. He sees the last in that series as a years-long project, with a twist. “I want to slowly make this album that is quote-unquote ‘perfect’ for the rest of my life, adding songs here and there,” he says. “And just have it in my will that after I die, it comes out.”

THIS IS WHAT ED SHEERAN DOES before he goes onstage in front of 50,000 people: practically nothing. He switches from his usual T-shirt and shorts and watch and sneakers into a modestly sharper stage outfit, and heads out, without so much as a final glance in the mirror or a comb through his hair. No vocal warmup, even. He wakes up on show days feeling no different than on any other days, and talks to the vast crowds the same way he speaks offstage. His persona is no persona. (As for the infamous photo of a glammed-up Beyoncé duetting with a dressed-down Ed: “I think it symbolizes two people being themselves, personally. She is the best performer on Earth. And I am a bloke in a T-shirt.”)

At 5 p.m. the day after our first meeting, just three hours before showtime at Auckland’s Eden Park stadium, Sheeran is back at the house, with the kids eating dinner at a circular wooden table, with summer light spilling in from the open patio doors. “Me and Cherry were talking earlier about how it’s so lovely,” says Sheeran, spoon-feeding Jupiter some rice. “We had an entire day. We did nothing but this. It’s so nice and wholesome having family on tour. On the last tour, I’d party till 7 a.m., sleep till 4 p.m., get up and do the gig. But I was like, 26. It’s very different.”

There’s a wireless sound system in a road case in the corner, and Sheeran uses some idle time before his show to play me some unreleased music. Like, a dizzying, unbelievable amount of unreleased music, in so many styles it almost feels like a prank. “I’ve got loads and loads and loads of shit,” he says. Instead of waiting for inspiration, his method is to just keep the faucet flowing. “I wrote 25 songs the week I wrote ‘Shape of You,’ ” he says. But he’s never had so much finished music piled up that he’s this excited about. It’s years’ worth of releases, in his estimation. “Who’s to say at what point creativity stops,” he says, “and you can’t write any more songs? At least there’s enough banked up.”

Beyoncé is the best performer on Earth,” Sheeran says of an infamous photo of them together. “And I am a bloke in a T-shirt.

He starts out by playing an airy ballad, “Magical,” from his second album with Dessner. “This is how it feels to be in love,” he sings. “This is magical.” Another Dessner song, a likely single, has a bright “Solsbury Hill” feel: “Saturday night is giving me a reason to rely on a strobe light,” he sings, amid more meditations on grief. A third Dessner production is a surging Bruce Springsteen-inspired track called “England.” 

There is, as it turns out, yet another completed album waiting in the wings, a collaboration with reggaeton superstar J Balvin. They knocked the whole thing out last year, after Sheeran randomly encountered Balvin (José, he calls him) in a hotel gym a couple of years earlier. The album is all ready to go, complete with already-shot videos, but again, with no release date in sight. He plays a track that bridges Afropop and reggaeton, with Burna Boy joining him and Balvin . Another Balvin production is a collaboration with Daddy Yankee, with Sheeran singing a hook between rapped verses; yet another is a slower reggaeton song where Sheeran actually raps in Spanish. “I wrote it in English,” he says, “and they translated it in the studio.” There are collaborations with Pharrell Williams and Shakira as well — turns out Sheeran has been writing for her next album, too, because why not?

Sheeran plays a grime track where he full-on speed-raps, trading off with the British rapper Devlin, another friend of Edwards. “Like Kendrick Lamar, this shit ain’t free,” Sheeran spits. There’s a drum-and-bass banger “for the ravers” that he wants to release as a double A side with a David Guetta-produced track where Sheeran praises the power of “summer vibration.” Another Guetta song is even more shameless in its Vegas-EDM feel, but it’s not for Sheeran — they’re trying to figure out who’ll sing it. 

He plays a remnant from time spent in Nashville, a nearly parodic bro-country song he wrote with Florida Georgia Line that Sheeran assumes they rejected as too-on-the-nose: “My neck’s still red, the sky’s still blue, my truck’s still big, my girl’s still you … we live where we live because we love living in Middle America.”

Then there’s a collaboration with Benny Blanco, and, oh, yeah, a lighters-up power ballad duet between Sheeran and Bieber, which Sheeran worked on with superproducer Andrew Watt, slated for Bieber’s next album. 

On top of it all, there’s the big-ass song Sheeran wrote for the new season of Ted Lasso . “Do you want to hear it?” he asks. “Because it’s fucking good.” “We’ll rise from the ashes and write in stars with our names,” he sings in a chorus Chris Martin will envy, complete with whoa-whoa-whoas.  “The joy was worth the pain/Love’s the beautiful game.”

“Sorry,” Sheeran says at the end, unnecessarily. “I know I’ve just, like, song-vomited on you.”

Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid, one of Sheeran’s most frequent collaborators, has long since gotten used to Sheeran’s genre hopping. “A songwriter is sort of an antenna,” he says. “They pick things up in the ether, and depending on how wide the frequency band of your antenna is, you tend to genre-fy yourself. With Ed, his frequency band is so wide that it really can come from anywhere and be anything.” But it’s a mistake, McDaid argues, to confuse facility with being facile: “He approaches every song he writes as if it’s the first song and the last song. He approaches it with this real tenderness and curiosity.”

It’s nearly showtime, and Sheeran strips from today’s outfit (nearly the same as yesterday’s, with the exception of rare Marty McFly-model Nikes) to his black boxer briefs, and pops on his stage clothes. He has a secret method of transport through the crowd that he asks me not to reveal. Once that mystery journey is over, we’re underneath his yacht-size rotating stage, currently covered by a sort of metal cage that will rise to reveal Sheeran after a countdown on the video screens. There’s about three minutes left, and Sheeran is still uncannily calm, promising a sound guy (known as Normal Dave, in contrast to another Dave in his employ) a celebratory drink soon. As the countdown hits 90 seconds, Sheeran insists that I scamper up to the stage itself, to the spot by his mic stand, and take it in. The vast crowd is visible through the enclosure, all around you, from the rugby field to the upper decks. You’re facing 50,000 people alone, armed with just your loop pedal and guitar. There doesn’t seem to be much to be calm about. 

Finally, Sheeran explains that the noise is coming from his loop pedal, which won’t be working for the rest of the concert. He finishes the show by playing seven songs, several of them not on the set list, all just voice and guitar, unadorned. He’s forced to rework his hits in strummy coffeehouse arrangements, rendering the pyro effects during “Bad Habits” slightly comical. The fireworks bursting from the stage at the very end of the concert are so incongruous that Sheeran can’t help laughing. 

For the crowd, the whole thing is a revelation, and you’ll hear people in Auckland talking about it on the street for days afterward. After all, how many other artists of Sheeran’s generation could even come close to pulling this off? 

He makes it clear his team needs to fix the problem, but there’s never a question of a tantrum, onstage or off. “What can you gain shouting at people?” he asks. “I also think people work harder for you. If someone’s shouting, you’re just like, ‘Fuck you.’ ”

We were supposed to do another interview tonight, but Sheeran bumps it until tomorrow, a decision he says he made onstage. Instead, he eats a steak (again, I get one too), and starts seriously drinking red wine. Some of the old schoolmates who now work for him fill the room, and pour themselves glasses. The lights dim, and any remaining tension eases. “Let’s just forget tonight,” Sheeran says, raising a glass. “Let’s just forget it ever happened.”

BUT HE DOESN’T FORGET. And he doesn’t get much sleep, either. One of his kids has tonsillitis, so he’s up most of the night, and when he wakes up, his first thought is of the previous night’s troubles. “It was a good outcome,” he acknowledges, “but it’s just not what people paid for. It’d be like going to watch Avatar, and it stops halfway through. Then James Cameron comes out at the end and just narrates it. You’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s a new experience!’ But it’s not what you paid for.”

When we meet again in the same backstage area the next day, he’s got on the same shorts and a pastel hoodie, and his energy is a little edgier than usual. His crew spent long hours pinpointing the source of that show-stopping static: Turns out subwoofer vibrations damaged a chip in the loop pedal’s digital brain, and they’re ordering backups.

We sit on the dressing-room couch and start talking about “Bad Habits,” his 2021 smash. He’s mentioned in the past that the song is about “addiction issues,” but it never seems to register with anyone. “If you sing that on a piano really slowly,” he says, “it’s like a confessional song about addiction.” 

Earlier, he told me he “used to be a party boy in my twenties.” But it went further than that. “I was always a drinker,” he says. “I didn’t touch any sort of like, drug, until I was 24.” But beyond weed, he did get into a “few” substances, which he won’t name, because he doesn’t want his kids reading it someday. “I remember just being at a festival and being like, ‘Well, if all of my friends do it, it can’t be that bad,'” he says. “And then sort of dabbling. And then it just turns into a habit that you do once a week and then once a day and then, like, twice a day and then, like, without booze. It just became bad vibes.”

Edwards’ cocaine-related death only cemented his feelings about certain substances. “I would never, ever, ever touch anything again, because that’s how Jamal died. And that’s just disrespectful to his memory to even, like, go near.”

Quitting hard liquor helped him moderate his food intake, and his newish exercise habit has changed his body. But food, too, has been a struggle. “I’m self-conscious anyway, but you get into an industry where you’re getting compared to every other pop star,” he says. “I was in the One Direction wave, and I’m like, ‘Well, why don’t I have a six pack?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, because you love kebabs and drink beer.’ Then you do songs with Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes. All these people have fantastic figures. And I was always like, ‘Well, why am I so … fat?’ ”

He chuckles, with zero humor. “So I found myself doing what Elton [John] talks about in his book — gorging, and then it would come up again.” (John put it this way in his autobiography: “I had developed bulimia.”) “There’s certain things that, as a man talking about them, I feel mad uncomfortable. I know people are going to see it a type of way, but it’s good to be honest about them. Because so many people do the same thing and hide it as well.” 

It’s almost showtime again, but Sheeran is happy to keep talking, with one half-joking request: “If I don’t cry in the next 40 minutes, that would be great.” This time, the show is flawless, with the hit singles at the end going off in their full, loop-pedal glory, the climactic fireworks fully earned. He makes a point of expressing his gratitude for his crew from the stage. 

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“Fuck me,” he says backstage afterward, in an entirely different tone, a white towel around his neck. “Perfect show! That was so good. We should fuck up more often.” He’s thrilled, and so ready to celebrate that you’d almost think it was his first big concert. The wine comes out again.

Sheeran is “very grateful to do what he does,” says McDaid, his songwriting partner. “A lot of people in his position aren’t. He walks into a room to write a song, and tells me how grateful he is to be doing this.”

Lately, he’s found more elemental reasons to be thankful. Earlier in the week, he and Seaborn made the two-hour trip from Auckland to rural Waikato, where Hobbiton — the Shire sets built for Lord of the Rings — still stands, among the impossible verdant beauty of New Zealand’s grasslands. A year after everything blew apart, the couple sat on a bench, sipped red wine, and watched the sun dip down, talking about their kids and their good fortune. “We’re so grateful,” Sheeran says, “to be alive.”

Produced by heather robbins and mary goughnour at clm. Photography direction by emma reeves . Fashion direction by alex badia . Market editor: emily mercer. Fashion market assistance by ari stark . Styling and grooming by liberty shaw and hilary owen . Tailoring by alberto rivera at lars nord studio . Set design by bette adams at mhs artists . Digital technician: creigh lyndon . Photography assistance by kyrre kristoffersen and nick grennon . Set design assistance by kaeten bonli and bell francis-bell . Photographed at pier 59 studios .

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Background [ ]

On October 25, 2012, in partnership with ABC News on the prime-time TV special All Access Nashville with Katie Couric – A Special Edition of 20/20, Swift announced that she would launch a North American stadium and arena tour in early 2013 in support of her fourth studio album, Red (2012). During a radio interview with WRVW, Swift mentioned that "It's nothing like any other tour before."

Swift told Billboard: "Of course, you know the tour will be a big representation of this record". "I'm so excited to see what songs the fans like the most and which ones jump to the forefront, because that's the first step. We always see which songs are really the passionate songs and the ones the fans are freaking out over the most, and those are the ones that are definitely in the set list. I can't wait for that."

Swift used Tom Petty's "American Girl" as her entrance song on her previous tour but now takes the stage to Lenny Kravitz's version of "American Woman". She sings a cover of The Lumineers's "Ho Hey" nightly, intertwined with her own "Stay Stay Stay".

Supporting Acts [ ]

• Ed Sheeran (North America)
• Austin Mahone (North America) (select venues)
• Joel Crouse (North America) (select venues)
• Brett Eldredge (North America) (select venues)
• Casey James (North America) (select venues)
• Florida Georgia Line (North America) (select venues)
• Neon Trees (New Zealand and Australia)
• Guy Sebastian (Australia)
• Ed Sheeran has a tattoo on his left arm which says Red.
• While on tour, Ed almost accidentally stabbed Taylor Swift with a sword. [4]

References [ ]

• ↑ ABC News Radio - Taylor Swift North American Red tour dates and musical guests.
• ↑ Billboard.com - Taylor Swift announces Oceanic tour dates.
• ↑ Taylor Swift announces European dates
• ↑ MTV Australia - Ed Sheeran admits he nearly stabbed Taylor Swift with a sword
• 1 Don't
• 2 Ed Sheeran
• 3 Cherry Seaborn