If you’ve been trying to call Ed Sheeran over the past decade, you probably haven’t had much success.
The four-time Grammy Award winner reminded fans that he hasn’t used his cellphone since 2015. He revealed on the Wednesday, March 26, episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that turning the phone back on was the inspiration behind his new song, “Old Phone.”
Sheeran, 34, recalled having to turn his phone over amid the copyright infringement lawsuit surrounding his song “Thinking Out Loud.” A jury cleared him of wrongdoing in 2023.
“In the lawsuit, they order you to give up all your old devices,” he explained. “So I handed everything in but I haven’t used a phone. I moved to a tablet in 2015, just on email, and so I switched my phone off in 2015 and left it in a box.”
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After the lawsuit, he got his phone back and turned it on. The notifications came pouring in, with each one taking him back in time.
“I switched it on, it was like going into a time machine,” he continued. “Like, the first text was my friend that had passed away the year before. The second text was an argument with an ex-girlfriend. The third text was a family member I haven’t spoken to in 10 years. The fourth text was another mate that died.”
The moment moved him so much that it spawned the song he debuted on The Tonight Show.
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“I was kind of, like, scrolling down, it really spun me out,” he said. “And that day, I wrote in my notes, like, ‘I found my old phone today’ and then finished this as a song, and I ended up writing it into a song.”
The song itself touches on emotional moments specific to Sheeran (“conversations with my dead friends”) and those lighter, frustrating moments we all endure (“combinations ’cause my passcode had changed”).
The name “Old Phone” has also lent itself to a pub that Sheeran will open in Ipswich, Massachusetts, for two days. To get in, guests must go onto their old phone and find a message or video that means a lot to them. Those messages and videos will then be projected onto the walls of the pub.
“We’re serving, like, Guinness and tater tots and s—. It’s gonna be so cool,” Sheeran teased.
The Old Phone pub will be open on Friday, March 28, and Saturday, March 29, and fans will be able to see how it was built in the music video for the accompanying song.
