![]() Sheeran said in court that he’d received encouragement from other songwriters worried about the trial’s implication for future litigation over their work. Sheeran’s legal team argued in court that his hit ballad and Gaye’s tune “share versions of a similar and unprotectable chord progression that was freely available to all songwriters”. Sheeran played a mash-up of his music as well as hits from Van Morrison, Blackstreet, Nina Simone and Bill Withers, as evidence that songs with similar structures can be seamlessly blended.Įd Sheeran arrives at federal court in New York, Wednesday. Later in the trial, Sheeran performed another mini-concert, using his guitar to demonstrate how a common chord progression could allow him to transition easily between Thinking Out Loud, Let’s Get It On and many other popular songs. He then picked up a guitar from behind the witness stand, played the chord progression to the song and sang the opening line: “When your legs don’t work like they used to before.” A lesson on chord progressions Sheeran demonstrated how his original line, “singing out now”, morphed into the song’s eventual title: “When I write vocal melodies, it’s like phonetics,” he said. “I draw inspiration from a lot from things in my life and family,” he said, explaining how the song was inspired by the love he witnessed between his grandparents. In over an hour of testimony, Sheeran explained how he wrote Thinking Out Loud with his friend and co-writer, Wadge, at his home in England in 2014. “Most pop songs can fit over most pop songs … if I had done what you’re accusing me of doing, I’d be a quite an idiot to stand on a stage in front of 20,000 people and do that,” Sheeran replied.Ī day later, he offered a demonstration accompanied by his usual acoustic guitar. In the early days of the trial the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Ben Crump, played a video of Sheeran transitioning seamlessly between Thinking Out Loud and Let’s Get It On during a concert in Zurich, arguing that it amounted to a confession. Sheeran’s defense rested on the ubiquity of certain musical standards and chord progressions, which are not owned by a single artist. Here are some key moments from the trial: A court concert (Another Sheeran hit, Shape of You – itself the focus of a UK copyright lawsuit that he won – was Spotify’s most-streamed track of the decade.) Sheeran pulled out a guitar several times, appeared to threaten the end of his career if he lost and expressed disdain for a case that, as one entertainment lawyer put it to the Guardian, had “a whiff of the US celebrity lawsuit about it”. The two-week trial in New York offered moments of levity as well as frustration for the mega-star, who is one of the most-streamed artists of the 2010s. ![]() (Gaye died in 1984 Townsend died in 2003.) The three plaintiffs allege that Sheeran and co-writer Amy Wadge stole “the heart” of the soul classic by using “melodic, harmonic and rhythmic compositions” that are “substantially and/or strikingly similar to the drum composition” of the song. The suit, originally filed in 2017, was brought by the descendants of Gaye’s co-writer, Ed Townsend.
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