Ed Sheeran will be on The Capital Evening Show with Roman Kemp tonight talking about recording new track ‘Happier’ in the cold room on the Queen Mary 2 Cruise Ship and how he wrote ‘How Would You Feel’ in under 15 minutes for his girlfriend.
On recording ‘Happier’ in the cold room on the Queen Mary 2 Cruise Ship…
RK: Ed talk to me about this track [‘Happier’]
ES: This was a track I almost left off completely. I’d written it with Ryan Tedder and Benny Blanco ages ago and it was just…for some reason we’d put an EDM beat on it and I was just like, ‘I really don’t like it’ and then I was on the Queen Mary 2 Cruise Ship, going through songs that we were looking to record when we got to Suffolk and we got to that and I was like ‘nah, I don’t really like it’ and then Benny took the drums off it and I was like ‘ah oh actually this has something’. The song now is in a better spot than it was
RK: I like it and you recorded it on the ship because Benny Blanco, the big producer, he doesn’t like flying right?
ES: Yeah but I don’t blame him to be honest, he was in like two, not plane crashes but near plane crashes in a day. So he was like flying over somewhere and the storm hit the plane and they had to land it and then the recovery plane that he got in, the same thing happened to, so he was just like ‘I’m not flying again’
RK: So you built a studio…
ES: In the kitchen of the Queen Mary, yeah, well the kind of like cold room, the fridge. It wasn’t really a fridge it was probably like twice the size of this
On writing ‘How Woud You Feel’ in under 15 minutes for his girlfriend’s taxi journey to the airport…
RK: I heard the story behind this track [How Would You Feel] and I want you to tell it, of how it made its way on to the album and how you came about writing it
ES: My girlfriend’s from my home town and she was working in New York for like three years and she’d flown back for a festival in our home town and that’s when we kind of like rekindled, I guess. And when she was taking a cab back to the airport, she got in a cab it was like a three-hour drive, and then I was sat at home on my own and I was like ‘oh I’ll write a song really quickly and send it to her so that she’s got something to listen to on the drive.’ Then forgot about it and then when the album was finished I asked her ‘what’s your favourite song?’ and she said ‘you’ve forgotten it exists’ and then sent it to me and then I quickly recorded it and put it on [the album]
RK: There you go…That’s a really nice story. So this song you’ve literally written it in what like, 15 minutes to an hour?
ES: Less than that, there’s not much to it, there’s like three or four lines
