My inspiration for song writing|

KAPLAN: For instance, your song "Small Bump," a song about losing a child—you sing it from your perspective, but it's actually about a friend?

SHEERAN: Yeah... it was quite a difficult subject to tackle. I wrote it from their perspective. It was my perspective looking on them to begin with. It's quite a touchy subject, so I wrote it from the perspective of actually being the parent.

KAPLAN: Where do you come up with the subjects of your songs, other than life experience as your inspiration, your songwriting is very creative. As a troubadour or pseudo-rapping, your music is something that hasn't been heard yet.

SHEERAN: I think it's good to remember that everything has been done before. The public has heard the stereotypical love songs a million times and they've heard the stereotypical life-or-death songs millions of times. It's good to mix it up a little bit. That's why the different subject matters and love songs on the album are a bit odd and have some rapping things in it and popular culture references. I just wanted to kind of make it a little bit different

KAPLAN: Your first single was obviously "The A Team." It's been getting a lot of airplay in the US. Can you tell me a little bit about how that song came about and the meaning behind it?

SHEERAN: I did a gig at a homeless shelter, and it was about one of the women there. It's her story. Well, the song itself was written all about her story, so the song is about a drug-addicted homeless woman.(Kaplan, I. (2011)

Ed Sheeran is my inspiration and I looked at his music it when it came to writing a song, he uses real life situations  and writes about them in a really unique way. In his interview Kaplan, I. (2011) he states that he used his friends story as a inspiration for his ‘small bump’ song but as it was a tricky subject he wrote it in the eyes of him but was actually about his friend.

Another example is ‘A Team’- Sheeran, E (2011). when he sang in a homeless shelter he picked up on a woman's life who was addicted to drugs and made a song from that, he also relates to this these because they are life experiences. 

I tried to look at my life experiences and try to write a song from there but for some reason it proved too difficult.

I did then look into other ideas I could do such as covers, in my last individual I looked at covers and I got a friend to cover a song as I was not confident enough to sing myself but I wanted to do something a little different as some covers mostly sound the same and I find it really difficult to make a cover of a song sound good once its been tweaked from the original as I always think you cant beat the original.