The A Team — Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran has written many more commercially successful songs than “The A Team”, but he’s never written a better song.
“The A Team” launched Ed Sheeran’s career back in 2011. And he’s gone on to release worldwide chart-toppers like “Perfect”, “The Shape Of You” and the Grammy-winning “Thinking Out Loud” in the years since.
He’s one of the most recognisable, and most successful, recording artists on the planet, and the UK’s Official Chart Company named him the recording artist of the 2010s for spending more weeks in the British charts during that decade than any other artist.
By any standard, that’s quite a career. I wouldn’t say I was a raving fan of all of his songs, but I’m most definitely a raving fan of “The A Team”, the song that got him started.
Ed Sheeran wrote “The A Team” a couple of years before his career really took off. He was inspired to write it after a charity gig he played at a homeless shelter. Back then he was just a scruffy lad with a guitar who nobody had heard of, so he got chatting to the people there and listened to their stories.
His conversation with one young woman inspired him to write “The A Team”. And I like the way he’s stated that he changed some of the details because he didn’t want to steal someone else’s story. That’s quite a respectful thing to do for someone he…
