“Songs are weird things,” Ed Sheeran says during Songwriter, a new documentary that chronicles the creative process of his triple platinum 2017 album, ÷. “They just come and go. They never give you any warning.”
Songwriter, which is currently in theaters and will be available on Apple Music on August 28th, manages to capture Sheeran’s songwriting process in real time. He gave unprecedented access to his cousin and longtime videographer, Murray Cummings, who decided to use his first film to zero in on the the elusive, rare moments of song creation that he felt had never been documented.
“There’s a scene in Jay-Z’s [2004 film] Fade to Black where you see him and Timbaland writing a song, and as soon as Timbaland plays the track I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, that’s the first time he’s ever played Jay-Z that riff that everybody now knows is a bit hit,’” says the director. “It really excited me, and I remember thinking to myself: I wish the whole movie was just all scenes like that.”
Songwriter offers a window into the idea-forming moments usually closed off for A-list artists. Sheeran can be seen on a tour bus, writing the multiplatinum Justin Bieber hit “Love Yourself.” You follow him on a cruise ship with Benny Blanco for a week of tinkering and writing, and on a songwriting retreat with fellow hitmakers in Malibu. At one point, a jetlagged Sheeran wakes up at 5 a.m.and goes outside and starts making up lyrics about his surroundings. “He said, ‘I’m awake anyway, I’m just gonna write a song,” remembers Cummings. “So I just grabbed my camera and set it down besides us … I just wanted to put the audience in the room.”
The writing of ÷ , it turned out, turned out to be a transformational time for Sheeran and his process. “Ed’s style of how he writes has changed,” says Cummings. “I was extremely lucky to be filming him at this time where he changed from being quiet and writing stuff down with a pen of paper to actually singing stuff out loud as he writes it. You get to hear his thought process out loud which didn’t happen that often before this album. From a film standpoint it’s just really interesting to be able to hear what he’s thinking.”
One unintended consequence of Cummings’ constant filming of Sheeran during the writing of his most recent album is that the filming itself ended up subtly influencing Sheeran’s own songwriting process. Knowing he was constantly being recorded freed Sheeran up to improvise lyrics and phrasing on the spot without writing them down. “Sometimes Ed would kind of forget what he had sung and then he would look at me and go, ‘You filmed that, right?’”
