On Thursday, Ed Sheeran appeared in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, testifying with a guitar in hand in a high-profile copyright trial. He was defending his hit song “Thinking Out Loud” against accusations of copying from Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.”
Sheeran played the four-chord sequence at the core of his song and explained that he wrote it in a few hours in 2014 with his longtime collaborator Amy Wadge. He said he heard Wadge strumming the chords when he stepped out of the shower and immediately thought they should do something with it.
“Thinking Out Loud” topped the charts in Britain and reached No. 2 in the United States. In 2016, it won a Grammy Award for Song of the Year. However, in 2017, the family of Ed Townsend, Gaye’s co-writer, sued Sheeran for copyright infringement, claiming that the chord progression with its syncopated pattern was copied from “Let’s Get It On.”
Sheeran has been attending the trial regularly since it began on Monday, listening to the testimonies of the accusers, including Kathryn Griffin Townsend, Ed Townsend’s daughter.
Read also:Jonathan Majors allegedly betrayed by close friends
During his appearance in court on Thursday, singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran refuted claims made by Alexander Stewart, a musicologist who served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs. Stewart had argued that Sheeran’s hit song “Thinking Out Loud” shared a nearly identical four-chord pattern with Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” He claimed that Sheeran played a minor chord similar to the one in the Gaye song. Sheeran denied this and played both versions in court to demonstrate his point.
Sheeran spent almost an hour on the stand recounting his journey from a struggling teenager to a global superstar. He left school at 17 to focus on his music and played at any pub open-mic night in London that would have him. He explained that he likes to work fast and often writes most of his songs in a day or even a few minutes. He said he has written as many as eight or nine songs in a single day.
