Ed Sheeran posts throwback pictures with Taylor Swift for new single Old Phone

Ever looked through a phone you had retired and got a blast from the past?

English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran did. And it was, as the 34-year-old said, “such an emotional journey” that he even wrote a song for it titled, well, Old Phone.

In an Instagram post tagging @teddysoldphone on April 29, Sheeran uploaded never-before-seen pictures, texts and notes from the phone he had stopped using in 2015. They included photos and videos of himself, including a picture with now-wife Cherry Seaborn when they were dating, and an old undated wefie with pop superstar Taylor Swift.

In the caption, Sheeran said he had turned his old phone off in December 2015 and moved all communications to e-mail full time. But when he was sued in a copyright case, the judge ordered him to surrender the device to the opposing side’s lawyers.

Sheeran, who was accused of copying Marvin Gaye’s classic Let’s Get It On (1973) for his 2014 hit Thinking Out Loud, eventually won the case in 2023. The case was first brought against him in 2018.

He wrote: “In the process, I switched on my old phone. The first message was from my friend (English deejay) Jamal Edwards, who had recently passed away (in 2022). The second was from my ex-girlfriend, whom I hadn’t been in contact with for years. The third was a family member I haven’t spoken to in a decade. And so on. It felt like a time capsule, a time of life that I was in, and living at that time in 2015.

“Turning it on really spun me out. I found myself scrolling through messages and conversations with people who are no longer here. I found myself crying at messages to friends who are now dead, whom I won’t get to speak to again. I found old photos of me with people I was so close to then, but we’ve lost touch since.”

He then wrote the song Old Phone. It will be released on May 1 at 11pm, Singapore time.

Pictures have been posted by the account @teddysoldphone since the end of March, but netizens took notice only when the Shape Of You (2017) singer recently tagged it on his main account.

One of the photos was from the 2015 Billboard Music Awards, showing Sheeran, boy band One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson and Niall Horan, as well as Swift and her then-boyfriend, singer Calvin Harris. Sheeran said he was “dribbly drunk” at the time.

Other snaps show Swift eating pizza, singer Harry Styles driving Sheeran around in a car, and a night out with late American rapper Mac Miller, who died of a drug overdose in 2018.

Sheeran wrote on the post about Miller: “Mac took me round Pittsburgh in 2015, we played a lot of pool and had a really really fun night. Miss him.”

There are also pictures of Sheeran with pop stars Bruno Mars and Ellie Goulding. Sheeran and Goulding were once rumoured to be a couple. Fans speculated that Sheeran wrote the song Don’t (2014) – about a girl who broke his heart – after she allegedly cheated on him with Horan.

The account even has a picture of Sheeran with former United States President Bill Clinton, whom the singer said he once played poker with.