The backstory: “What’s that? We have to do something with that”
When songwriter Amy Wadge knocked on Ed Sheeran’s door in February 2014, she had no idea that she would be about to co-write one of the era’s biggest pop hits. “His album was finished,” Wadge later recounted to Wales Online, referring to Sheeran’s second record, ×,“and I was just going to his house to have some chilling-out time with my mate. It wasn’t ever supposed to be a songwriting session.” Not that a collaboration would have been out of the question: four years earlier, the pair had co-written all five songs on Sheeran’s Songs I Wrote With Amy EP.
As Wadge sat down on Sheeran’s sofa and the two songwriters began chatting, it was clear something was making Wadge anxious. “She was going through financial troubles,” Sheeran later told the Daily Mirror, “and she asked if I could put a song from when I was 17 on the deluxe album, so she could get a little bit of money and pay the mortgage and bills and stuff.” Always loyal to his friends, Sheeran was happy to oblige, much as he had done previously, when adding another one of their co-writes, Gold Rush, to the deluxe edition of his debut album, +.
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For the moment, at least, this was purely a social visit: Sheeran had invited Wadge over to stay so she could escape her money worries, and the pair had made plans to go out for dinner with Sheeran’s parents later that evening. But when Sheeran nipped upstairs to take a shower, Wadge spotted the guitar that Harry Styles had bought Sheeran as a gift. Picking it up, she sat back down on the sofa and spontaneously began jamming a few chords. That was all it took. “Ed came running downstairs and said, ‘What’s that? We have to do something with that,’” Wadge later remembered.
The writing: “We had conversations about everlasting love”
Returning home at about 2am, Wadge and Sheeran sat in the kitchen to see if they could finish the song. Even at this early stage, the lyrics they came up with were deeply personal: Sheeran was grieving the recent loss of his grandfather, while Wadge was struggling to process the news that her mother-in-law was terminally ill. “We had conversations about everlasting love,” Wadge later said, explaining how Thinking Out Loud began to come together around notions of lifelong romance and the idea of growing old with a soulmate. In just 20 minutes, the song was finished.
Sheeran could hardly contain his excitement. “It should be on the album,” he insisted, telling Wadge that he wanted to record Thinking Out Loud as a last-minute addition to ×. The next day, as he listened back to the demo he had recorded on his phone, Sheeran knew that they had written something extraordinary. He sent Wadge a quick text message (“This song’s a banger you know”) and even shared a brief ten-second clip of the tune on social media to build buzz among his fans. All Wadge could do was wait.
