Two things you probably didn’t know about Ed Sheeran: He had a stutter as a child, and he cured it by rapping with Eminem.
Sheeran stuttered after undergoing laser surgery to remove a birthmark from his face. “One day, they forgot to put the dope on, and ever since then, I’ve been stuttering,” he recalled in 2015. He attended speech therapy to work on these pains, but, as he told Howard Stern recently, it was actually a gift from his uncle that helped him the most.
When I was nine years old, my uncle bought me The Marshall Mathers LP, And he said to my dad, “This guy is the next Bob Dylan, you should let him listen,” he said. “My dad didn’t really record it. He’d say, ‘Okay, Edward’s going to go listen to that. ‘ And by learning that recording and going over it back-to-back, I’ve cured my stutter.”
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Now that Sheeran is a huge pop star (he doesn’t have to quit music anytime soon), he and Eminem have met up, and he confirmed that the rapper knows his story. Last year, Eminem asked Sheeran to play “Stan” with him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which Sheeran immediately accepted even though the performance took place on his day off amid the filming of an upcoming documentary.
“I was really nervous beforehand,” Sheeran said of meeting the rapper for the first time, noting that he is very private. “I got invited to his studio in Detroit and I was kind of sitting there like, ‘Oh, is he discreet? And as soon as he got in, we just started talking about Marvel comics and things like that. I was like, “Okay, we’re cool.” Watch Sheeran recall the story below.
Sheeran was recently acquitted of allegations of copyright infringement in a lawsuit brought by Structured Asset Sales, an entity that owns part of the copyright to “Let’s Get It On” co-writer Ed Townsend. A Manhattan jury declared Sheeran’s 2014 song “Thinking Out Loud” to be “independently created” and not plagiarized from Marvin Gaye’s 1973 song. Sheeran had threatened to quit music if found guilty at trial, but since he won, he may direct His attention is now on country music.
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