Ed Sheeran's sophomore album, stylized as X but pronounced Multiplywill celebrate its official 10th anniversary in a few weeks, on June 21. But for the record that changed his life, largely solidifying his place in the pop ecosystem with “Thinking Out Loud” and “Photograph,” the singer and songwriter began the celebration early with a special performance at Brooklyn's Barclays Center on Wednesday evening.
Sheeran, not one to ever take himself too seriously, spent the hours before the show riding around New York on bikes with the members of Laundry Day, the NYC-bred band whose recently viral boom landed them an opening slot at the concert.
It was an über casual way to pass the time before he would treat an arena full of fans to the first-ever live performances of X deep cuts “Shirtsleeves” and the grief-stricken “Even My Dad Does Sometimes.”
During the show, Sheeran performed the entirety of the decade-old album. This meant that for the first time since 2015, he revisited his catalog highlight “Afire Love,” as well as “Runaway,” “The Man,” and “English Rose,” which was initially only released on the Wembley Edition of the album. The setlist also included “Take It Back,” last performed in 2016, and a new arrangement of “Nina,” which Sheeran hasn't performed since 2014.
Sheeran also included his contribution to The Fault in Our Stars soundtrack, “All of the Stars,” alongside covers of Rudimental's “Lay it All on Me” and Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah.” Ahead of the show, the musician spent an hour and a half relearning his old songs by him on Instagram Live.
“I'm more calculated than people think,” Sheeran told Rolling Stone in 2014, just weeks before the album was released. “When I said I wanted to play Madison Square Garden, a lot of people said I was nuts. And I made sure I did it. And when I said I wanted to sell 4 million albums, and we were stuck on 2.5 million, I went to the States and got on the Taylor Swift tour and made sure I did it.”
He added: “Sometimes I feel like this isn't my life at all, that I'm just living someone else's life vicariously. I know that at some point, my career is not gonna have the same trajectory it has now. But by the time I have kids, I can always be like, 'Look, I met this person, and I partied with this person. And I had a fucking wicked time.'”
But when Rolling Stone caught up with Sheeran — now a husband and a father — last year as he released the final album of his mathematics series (2011's Plus, 2014's Multiply2017's Divideand 2023's Subtract), he had hit a new stride creatively. “Who's to say at what point creativity stops,” he said, explaining the vault of songs he has built up over the past decade, “and you can't write any more songs? At least there's enough banked up.”
