Lewis Capaldi On Working With Ed Sheeran
Lewis Capaldi has spoken about working with Ed Sheeran on his upcoming album in an interview with Music Week. The two huge-selling singer-songwriters collaborated on Pointless, the next single to be released from Capaldi’s Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent, due May 2023.
Buy Ed Sheeran vinyl, CDs and merch at the Dig! store
Capaldi waxed lyrical about Sheeran’s talents. “I think he’s the best British songwriter of the last 20 years, but I had reservations about putting out a Sheeran co-write as the first song because it would be portrayed as ‘Ed Sheeran wrote my first single back’ and I didn’t want that to be the takeaway. He understood where I was coming from.”
The singer, currently riding high with his comeback single, Forget Me, revealed how the collaboration happened: “I went into the studio with Johnny McDaid and Steve Mac and at the end of the first day they said, ‘We wrote this verse with Ed, but we couldn’t think of a chorus to save our lives, do you want to have a look? So I gave it a listen, did my interpretation of a chorus and a middle eight and it came together well.”
In a previous interview with the BBC, Capaldi revealed that he insisted on some lyric changes to the song. Sheeran’s original lyrics, ran: “She gives me more than everything, I’ll give her my last name.” Capaldi said, “I was like, ‘Ed, this is 2022. No-one has to take anyone’s second name. I’m not singing that! I don’t even think,” he adds, “that Ed’s own wife has got his last name.”
Capaldi also told the BBC that he was initially unsure about working with Sheeran, “My ego was going, ‘I don’t want people thinking Ed wrote my song’. I actually mentioned that to him and he offered to take up a pseudonym – but at the end of the day, he did help write it so there should be no question.”