![]() Just a month after that amendment, Sheeran credited songwriters Mark Harrington and Thomas Leonard on his 2014 song “Photograph,” settling a $20 million lawsuit in which the pair claimed he ripped off a song they penned for the 2010 winner of The X Factor, Matt Cardle, called “Amazing.” And a year later, in 2018, he settled another lawsuit, along with country singers Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, for a song he co-wrote with the pair called “The Rest of Our Life” that Australian musicians Sean Carey and Beau Golden alleged was a “blatant copying” of the song they wrote for artist Jasmine Rae called “When I Found You.”īut Sheeran’s legal woes are hardly in the past. While The Weeknd’s reputation has hardly been crippled by these accusations-his foray into ’80s dance-pop on After Hours has been largely interpreted as a conscious tribute as opposed to theft-Sheeran’s fast-accruing legacy of allegedly copying his peers’ homework has left a larger imprint on the way his artistry is perceived and questioned by the public, which makes “Bad Habits” feel like another liability rather than a savvy segue into the updated disco sounds of the new decade.Ĭuriously, the most notable and widely discussed of these allegations didn’t involve a lawsuit at all, but resulted in Sheeran accepting defeat when he preemptively credited Xscape members Kandi Burruss (also a cast member on The Real Housewives of Atlanta) and Tameka “Tiny” Harris on his smash hit “Shape of You'” in 2017 after social media users suggested that the song’s pre-chorus sounded like TLC’s “No Scrubs,” which the pair co-wrote. It’s interesting that The Weeknd is considered a main point of reference for Sheeran’s new work, not just because his recent music is so obviously inspired by artists before him but because both musicians have attracted several plagiarism lawsuits in the relatively short time they’ve been in the public eye. That Sheeran has trailed it as a “surprise” and “mad” tells you more about his innate populism than the song itself: it’s a well-written, extremely commercial pop song, cowritten by regular collaborators Fred Gibson and Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid, the latter of whom also had a hand in earlier Sheeran hits Shape of You, Photograph and Bloodstream.The song’s themes of indulgence and self-destruction (“my bad habits lead to late nights endin’ alone / conversations with a stranger I barely know / swearing this will be the last, but it probably won’t”) set over an ’80s dance beat have also struck some as similar to The Weeknd’s blockbuster album, including The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis who highlighted his “influence in its lyrical conflation of sex with wracked, compulsive hedonism.” This is not a state of affairs that Bad Habits looks likely to change. He’s spent the last decade enjoying the kind of success that, in one sense at least, brooks no argument: even his loudest detractor couldn’t argue against his ability to write one song after another that attains a weird kind of omnipresence, hits that evolve into inescapable facts of daily life. ![]() Every track is immediately recognisable – you could have spent your every waking hour engaged in a dogged attempt to avoid the music of Ed Sheeran and you’d still know exactly what they were and who they were by within seconds of them starting. ![]() The “plays” column of the latter makes for mind-boggling reading: the figures look less like streaming statistics and more like long-distance phone numbers. ![]() ![]() Spotify has chosen to promote Ed Sheeran’s new single by sitting it at the head of a playlist of his previous hits. ![]()
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