Even Ed Sheeran’s Apology Took Both Sides

One of Ed Sheeran’s enduring contributions to the texture of twenty-first-century music—let’s say you are looking for one—will probably be the repopularization of the loop pedal. This is a technology, which Sheeran mastered in his early years as a busker, that lets a guy perform with himself, in echoes, alone, harmonizing with his own voice. The loop pedal allows the bedroom beat-maker and the YouTube singer to go out into the real world. It can turn an acoustic guitar into a threat. On his current world tour, Sheeran has spent a lot of time standing and looping alone. Ahead of his most recent performance, in Philadelphia, he had allowed one of his supporting acts, the rapper Macklemore, to be removed from the tour for saying the words “Free Palestine” onstage. Sheeran’s remaining supporting acts—the band Lukas Graham and the singer-songwriters Aaron Rowe and Finneas—and his backing band, the Irish folk troupe Beoga, all withdrew in solidarity.

The musical contributions of Macklemore have been fewer than Sheeran’s, yet morally clearer. At two previous concerts, in New Jersey, the Seattle-based rapper had performed his protest song “Hind’s Hall,” named after a building that protesters at Columbia had renamed for Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who had been killed by Israeli soldiers. I had been orbiting the political side of Macklemore for some time—in 2017, he caused a similar news event by performing the anti-homophobia song “Same Love” at a high-profile sporting event in Australia during a gay-marriage vote, which I covered—and, over the years, I’d become warily appreciative of the rapper, best known, previously, for novelty songs and his earnest-white-boy persona.

In the lead-up to the concert in Philadelphia, social media had been flooded with mirror images of the same joke: “I’m trying to separate the art from the artist but the other way around,” of Macklemore; “I’m trying to think of a way to boycott Ed Sheeran’s music more than I usually do,” for Sheeran. It felt nice, for a while, to add to Sheeran and Macklemore two things that, respectively, they lack: politics and relevance.

Recently, the most exciting thing about Sheeran seemed to be his cowardice. A few hours before the show, a hundred or so local protesters gathered at a nearby train station. The demonstrators seemed embarrassed by the fact that they had been brought there by an Ed Sheeran concert. “Thank you for being here today for what I would like to be known as a show of support for Gaza and uplifting voices in Palestine, and not the ‘Ed Sheeran rally,’ ” an organizer in a blue shirt said into a megaphone. (A man named Mack told me that the focus should remain on Gaza, and he pointed out that tank shells used in the attack that killed Hind Rajab had been made by a Philadelphia-based weapons company, Day & Zimmermann.)

A protester named Asa Khalif, who wore a shirt that said “STOP GENOCIDE,” described Sheeran’s music as “beige and bland,” adding, “For those who are in love and want to have a wedding song—so be it.” He had a higher opinion of Macklemore: “ ‘Thrift Shop,’ I think, was genius. And it’s stood the test of time.” Another attendee told me, “I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of Macklemore, but I like what he does.”

How did the Sheeran fans feel? Outside the concert venue, a woman wearing a Taylor Swift shirt (she told me that she’s liked Sheeran ever since his appearance on Swift’s song “Everything Has Changed,” and “because he looks like Ron Weasley”) said that she was disappointed in Sheeran, but “sometimes singers can’t do anything.” (Reportedly, Sheeran had been asked to drop Macklemore by Robert Kraft, who owns the stadium in Boston that Sheeran is set to perform at next; Sheeran has said that the decision to remove Macklemore was made by the tour promoter.) The woman said that Sheeran had experienced his own troubles. “After his wife’s cancer battle, this might just be too much for him,” she said. “He’s, like, ‘Can’t we have one night of peace, every time I go do a concert, and not think about stuff?’ ”

“I’m in agreement with Macklemore,” Rachealle Davis, a Sheeran fan from Scotland, said. Of Sheeran, she added, “I think maybe he should have grown a set of balls.” Still, an Ed Sheeran concert is a form of “escapism,” she said. “It’s easy listening. We’ve listened to it most of our life.” Two mega-fans, Eva Stevens and Kizzy Holton, wearing Sheeran tour shirts, had driven up from Maryland. “I think Ed is apolitical, period,” Holton said, approvingly. “I think that he kind of sits in the middle of all the issues.”

It has, arguably, never been more pop to be political. More than two thousand miles away and three weeks earlier, Daisy Chain Fields Music Festival, hosted by Olivia Rodrigo, had politics as its purpose. Hayley Williams, the lead singer of Paramore, recently interpolated the lines “Fuck ICE” and “Free Palestine” into a song, during a live performance. Stevens said the middle was now the most dangerous place to be. “Those are the people who get picked on,” she said.

I brought up Rodrigo and suggested that Sheeran, in his attempts to stay neutral, now seemed to be the outlier. “But you know what?” Stevens said, “That takes heart.” Holton agreed. We were standing near the stadium; a beautiful sunset was coming down over the parking lot. Holton said, “It takes courage to stand alone in the gap.”

I was curious to see how a concert with no opener would open. Now that the event was Mackle-less, ticket prices had dropped dramatically, but the stadium was fairly full. (I found a scarcely believable survey, conducted by the British phone company O2, that ranked Sheeran as the third artist that respondents were most interested in seeing live, after the Beatles and Queen.) Around me, in the nosebleeds, were a mix of children in big friend groups and softly bopping couples. The pre-show screen displayed a graphic of a peaceful, undulating pink wave.

Sheeran emerged—alone, in jeans and a blue T-shirt—to a huge cheer, and began with an apology. Reading partly from a teleprompter, he said he’d been “making mistakes” over the past week—he did not mention the names of any of his former supporting acts—and added, “What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable.”

“Everyone here can stand beside people they don’t agree with on everything, but they can all agree on singing these songs,” he said, then strummed his guitar into “Castle on the Hill,” a frenetic, bass-drum-heavy track about being homesick and fulfilling your dreams. Fireworks shot up from the stage. (Usually, Sheeran starts each show on the tour with a song called “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You.” Not this time.)

The stage for Sheeran’s tour has a glittering circular screen set into its center, twinkling like a ring light. It reminded me of the Portal, the short-lived art installation in New York that allowed people to wave at—or, in some instances, flash—people at a matching screen, in Dublin. For the two nights that Macklemore had performed on the tour, he had used the screen to display images of destruction in Gaza, as though it were a grim magic mirror. Sheeran often used it to show his feet as they hit the loop pedals.

I had been waiting to see what would happen when Sheeran arrived at the middle segment of his show, which he usually plays with the Irish band Beoga. Before “Galway Girl,” a Sheeran song for which Beoga’s violinist, Niamh Dunne, had written the main riff, Sheeran announced that he had replaced them. “When my friends dropped out of this show,” he explained, he had turned to Alicia Enstrom, a violinist from Kansas, and a crew of stand-ins, who, Sheeran told us, repeatedly, had learned Beoga’s parts in three days. (He did not mention Beoga by name.) As they played “Galway Girl,” the screen displayed an Irish knot and flashed the colors of the Irish flag, while green-and-red fireworks went off.

Sheeran repeatedly said that his shows brought people together, and it was charming to see groups of friends, mostly young, turning and singing to one another. (I also enjoyed “Thinking Out Loud.”) But, for all the talk of Sheeran as easy listening and harmonious, I found the listening not so easy. In between songs, he kept talking about how this had been the worst week of his life, in a tone of self-pity. “How am I going to get musicians to stand onstage with me,” he asked, “in a week where no one wants to stand onstage with me?” Sheeran said that he had removed a B-stage—one that extends into the audience—because he was “afraid of what might happen.” At one point, he sat cross-legged and said that he wondered whether he “even wanted to be an artist at all.”

But everyone else seemed happy to be there, and cheered each message of neutrality. There was a moment, during the scripted mea culpa, when the crowd roared after Sheeran said that he wanted his shows to be about “humanity, not politics,” cutting him off before he could say, “But this is a humanitarian issue.” It reminded me, slightly, of a tweet that I’d previously thought of as a heightened piece of satire: “Just got back from the centrist rally. Amazing turnout. Thousands of people holding hands and chanting ‘Better things aren’t possible.’ ”

Sheeran said, in as many words, that he was glad nobody there was mad at him. It felt a little enabling. “I’m feeling all of my friends and family abandon me,” he said. “But I look at the end of the week and I see fifty thousand people who haven’t abandoned me.” He added, “I love you.”

The sense of atonement faded as the night went on. Toward the end of the show, Sheeran told the crowd, “The one thing that I would like to apologize for is the first bit of the show where it wasn’t about music, and I had to talk”—the apology. In the past twenty-four hours, other artists, including Jack Antonoff and Imagine Dragons, had said “Free Palestine” or appeared with a Palestinian flag, onstage. But, if Sheeran’s music is feel-good, then two and a half hours of Ed Sheeran had certainly made the artist feel better. He went offstage and returned in a bright-pink jersey of his favorite soccer team, Ipswich Town, with the name of the tour, Loop, in place of the team sponsor. The stadium staff readied more fireworks. The first song of the encore was “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You.” ♦

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