Ed Sheeran is fresh off a major legal win as his years-long copyright battle over “Shape Of You” has come to an end in his favor. This comes after Sheeran settled a copyright claim over “Photograph” in 2017, now Sheeran says that since then, he has filmed “every single” one of his songwriting sessions to prevent future plagiarism accusations.
In a recent interview with BBC2’s Newsnight, Sheeran said:
“I started doing it from ‘Photograph,’ started filming every single session for my stuff, so I would film every single session for my album, because I’d be like, ‘I don’t want to have this situation happen again.’ So now I just film everything. Everything’s on film and we’ve had claims come through on songs and we go, ‘Well, here’s the footage and you watch, and you’ll see that there’s nothing there’
I mean, there’s the George Harrison quote where he says he’s scared to touch the piano because he might be touching someone else’s note, and there’s definitely a feeling of that in the studio sometimes. I personally think the best feeling in the world, the best feeling, is the euphoria around the first idea of writing a great song, like the first spark where you go, ‘Oh this is special, we can’t spoil this, this is amazing.’ But that feeling has now turned into, ‘Oh wait, let’s stand back for a minute. Have we touched anything?’ You know? You find yourself, in the moment, second-guessing yourself.”
Watch the interview clip below.
“I didn’t play Photograph for ages after that… I felt weird about it, it kind of made me feel dirty.”
Ed Sheeran tells #Newsnight he regrets settling a previous multi-million pound copyright dispute as it opened the floodgates to other claimshttps://t.co/MNvpv3ejzY pic.twitter.com/dxwjurfHfn
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) April 8, 2022
Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.