Ed Sheeran defends himself in court, with his guitar

NEW YORK – English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran testified with a guitar on Thursday at a closely watched copyright trial, defending his hit ballad Thinking Out Loud (2014) against

an accusation that he had copied it

from late soul singer Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On (1973).

Cradling his acoustic instrument in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, Sheeran demonstrated the four-chord sequence at the heart of his song, which he said was written in a few hours in early 2014 with his friend and long-time collaborator Amy Wadge.

The 32-year-old recounted stepping out of the shower of his home when he heard Wadge strumming the chords, and he remembered thinking: “We need to do something with that.”

The song went to No. 1 in Britain and No. 2 in the United States, and in 2016 won a Grammy Award for Song of the Year.

But in 2017, the family of the late Ed Townsend, Gaye’s co-writer, sued for copyright infringement, saying that the chord progression, with its syncopated pattern, was copied from Let’s Get It On.

Sheeran has been a regular presence at the trial, which began on Monday in US District Court in Manhattan, listening to the testimony of his accusers, including Townsend’s daughter.

Sheeran used part of his appearance on Thursday to rebut an assertion by Mr Alexander Stewart, a musicologist serving as an expert witness for the plaintiffs. Both Thinking Out Loud and Let’s Get It On revolve around a nearly identical four-chord pattern.

Mr Stewart argued that for the first 24 seconds of Thinking Out Loud, Sheeran plays a minor chord, similar to the one in the same position throughout Let’s Get It On.

But Sheeran denied that he played that chord, and in court, demonstrated it both ways – first, the version he says he has played at “every single gig”, and then, with a slight grimace, the minor version that Mr Stewart suggested.

“It works very, very well for him,” Sheeran said, “but it’s not the truth.”

Sheeran testified for nearly an hour on Thursday, with most of that time devoted to recounting his career trajectory from hardscrabble teenage beginnings to global stardom.

He left school at 17 to concentrate on music, and played every pub open-mic night in London that he could.

“I would play anywhere that would have me,” he testified.

At the same time, he said, he was developing as a songwriter.

Then as now, he has preferred to work fast, saying that most of his songs are written in a day, or even a matter of minutes. He has written as many as eight or nine songs a day, he said.

For much of the last decade, he has been one of the biggest hitmakers in pop music, dominating streaming platforms and collaborating with fellow stars such as Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Beyonce.

Next week, he will release a new album, - (pronounced Subtract), and embark on a North American stadium tour.

Thinking Out Loud was created during a two-day writing session with Wadge at his home in the south of England.

The pair started the song before dinner and finished it later that same evening, he said, recording the track on Sheeran’s iPhone. The finished version was made at a studio just days later.

The song was inspired, he said, by the decades-long love he observed beween his grandparents.

“I draw inspiration a lot from people in my life,” Sheeran testified.

He is expected to return to the stand when the trial resumes on Monday. NYTIMES