The Number Ones: Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You”

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Picture this: Ed Sheeran is wearing sunglasses indoors, in winter, at nighttime. He’s rocking five gold chains and a skintight shiny-silver suit. He walks into every room like “I am the baddest motherfucker in here, and you are all lucky to be in my presence.” If you witnessed Ed Sheeran doing all of this with your own two eyes, you’d still be like, “Oh, I get it. Ed Sheeran is making a sly, self-deprecating comment about pop-star excesses.” This is the Ed Sheeran thing. He is pop’s great everyman, the global supernova who looks like he slept in too late and didn’t have time to comb his hair before showing up to his graphic-design job.

Can you imagine a big star who’s less threatening than Ed Sheeran? He’s your friend’s little brother who always wants to hang out with you guys but who usually doesn’t get the invitation. He’s the guy in the next dorm room over who takes his acoustic guitar everywhere. He’s someone who makes polite conversation with you in the supermarket line and who you never think about again for the rest of your life. In a world full of larger-than-life pop stars, Ed Sheeran went in the other direction. He’s smaller than life, and that has made him bigger than just about all of his competition. His nice-guy busker routine has been filling stadiums for more than a decade. It’s unfathomable.

To put it another way: Sex was never a big part of the Ed Sheeran elevator pitch. He’s not unhandsome, but most pop stars exude sex in one way or another, and that’s not him. He could always sing love songs, but love songs and sex songs are generally not the same thing. And yet Ed Sheeran made the biggest hit of his life, one of the biggest hits of this century, by singing about his bedsheets smelling like pussy juice.

What can we do with this? It would be one thing if “Shape Of You” was a fleeting little novelty, but it’s not that. It’s globally inescapable. It’s part of the societal wallpaper. It’s broken though it ways that songs simply don’t break through anymore. Ed Sheeran forced people to imagine him having sex, and the whole world was like, “Yeah, we want to think about Ed Sheeran painting the headboard with his jizz. We want to picture Ed Sheeran humping so vigorously that he gets a leg cramp. Ed Sheeran sweating so hard that little droplets fall off and land on your forehead? Sure. Give us that.” People are such puzzles. They will always surprise you.

It was supposed to be a Rihanna song. That part’s not a surprise, right? In 2016, when Ed Sheeran and his collaborators wrote “Shape Of You,” people just assumed that Rihanna would continue to be the center of the pop universe for the foreseeable future. Nobody thought she’d just dip and become a lingerie billionaire. Whenever a new Rihanna record was on the horizon, the world’s most successful pop songwriters all got together and tried come come up with things that Rihanna might want to sing. Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” which sounds more than a little like “Shape Of You,” was supposed to be a Rihanna song, too. Rihanna does exude sex, to the point where she never would’ve accepted a song as doofy as “Shape Of You,” but that was the idea.

Or it was one of the ideas, anyway. In 2016, Ed Sheeran was already a shockingly huge pop star, and he had a successful sideline writing for other artists. This column already got into Sheeran’s origin story when discussing Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself,” since Sheeran was the main writer behind that one. By the time that song came out, Sheeran headlined stadiums in the UK and arenas in the US. His sophomore album x — the early ones are all named after mathematical operations — was already quadruple platinum. Its lead single “Thinking Out Loud” was a #2 hit, and it probably would’ve gone all the way if the “Uptown Funk!” colossus didn’t stand in its way. (“Thinking Out Loud” is a 7.)

The next Ed Sheeran album was poised to become a very big deal. But when Sheeran and his collaborators came up with “Shape Of You,” they weren’t thinking about that next album. Instead, they were trying to come up with tracks for other artists. Originally, they were thinking about Little Mix, the British girl group that was huge in the UK and never much more than a curiosity here. (Little Mix’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit, 2015’s “Black Magic,” peaked at #67.) Then, Sheeran got thinking about the song as a possible collaboration between Rihanna and the dance group Rudimental, another UK phenomenon that never got much traction in America. (Rudimental’s only Hot 100 hit happens to be an Ed Sheeran collab: 2015’s “Lay It All On Me,” which peaked at #48.)

At that day’s songwriting session, Ed Sheeran had two co-writers, both of whom must’ve earned themselves ungodly amounts of money in the roughly 90 minutes that it took to come up with “Shape Of You.” One of them was a regular collaborator. Johnny McDaid was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and he’s a good 15 years older than Sheeran. In the ’00s, McDaid was the leader of Vega4, a London-based band that popped up in a bunch of soundtracks but never had any real success. In 2011, McDaid joined a band that did have real success: Snow Patrol, the sad Scottish indie band who took an unexpected leap toward adult-contempo stardom in the mid-’00s. “Chasing Cars,” Snow Patrol’s biggest American hit, went all the way to #5 in 2006. In retrospect, “Chasing Cars” could’ve easily been an Ed Sheeran song. (It’s a 7.) Anyway, McDaid wasn’t in Snow Patrol when they made that song. McDaid is still in Snow Patrol, and he’s apparently been a participant in some of that band’s recent internal drama. He’s also been coupled up with Courteney Cox for the past decade, and they were engaged for a while. He’s in love with the shape of her.

Before he joined Snow Patrol, Johnny McDaid was already helping write songs for other artists. For whatever reason, his earliest clients were mostly German: Schiller, Lena, Paul Van Dyk. In 2012, McDaid co-wrote “Say Nothing,” a #2 UK hit for the British singer Example. (I can’t believe there’s a successful singer with a name as hopelessly generic as Example. England is wild.) Two years after that, McDaid co-wrote a bunch of songs on Ed Sheeran’s x album, so those guys were clearly comfortable working together. (McDaid’s work will appear in this column again.)

Sheeran’s other co-writer was another older guy, and Sheeran had never met him before they went into that session together. Steve McCutcheon, known professionally as Steve Mac, is a producer with a deep background in dance music. In 1990, the teenage Steve Mac was part of a house crew called Nomad, and they had a #2 hit with “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion,” a rave anthem that Mac co-produced. From there, he joined another dance group called Undercover, and their 1992 version of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street,” which Rafferty reportedly hated, was another #2 hit in the UK.

At some point in the late ’90s, Steve Mac became the main producer and one of the main songwriters for Westlife, the Irish boy band who had a ridiculously huge run in the UK but who never meant much of anything in America. This column, you may note, is full of references to artists who were huge in the UK and who never mattered over here. Ed Sheeran really escaped that trap, and that trap is not easy to escape. Mac was the producer and co-writer of Westlife’s only Hot 100 hit: The treacly ballad “Swear It Again,” which peaked at #20 in 2000. That was Westlife’s debut single, and it went all the way to #1 in the UK. Simon Cowell, Westlife’s manager, saw that Westlife and Steve Mac made sense together, and he kept pairing them up. Westlife have 12 chart-topping singles in the UK — seriously, it’s ridiculous — and Mac produced eight of them. Mac was still producing Westlife records as recently as 2021. He also did a lot of work with Simon Cowell projects like Il Divo and Susan Boyle. When it comes to canned, happily uncool British pop, the man knows what he’s doing. (We’ll see Steve Mac’s work in this column again, too.)

After “Shape Of You” blew up and took over the world, The New York Times put together a great video about its construction, a kind of early version of thew newspaper’s Diary Of A Song series. The opening sound on “Shape Of You” is a tingly little marimba riff that runs all through the track as an unchanging, vaguely maddening loop. In that Times video, Sheeran says, “It was the first time I’d ever been in with Steve. Literally the first thing he did was he walked over to a keyboard and played” that riff. Mac’s explanation: “It just felt like a world sound.”

Ed Sheeran likes to work very, very quickly. When he plays live, even in stadiums, he does it totally solo, often building tracks from scratch with a loop pedal. That’s what he did when he performed “Shape Of You” at the Grammys in 2017. When he’s in the studio, he tries to come up with stuff that he can replicate onstage, and that pushes him toward simpler sounds. Honestly, that simplicity is probably one of his secret weapons as a songwriter. Sheeran’s songs might be corny, but they’re rarely overwrought. So once he had that keyboard riff, Sheeran didn’t want to wait around for Steve Mac to come up with drum sounds. Instead, he created his own percussion track on the guitar — thumping on the body, muting his own rhythmic strums. (In the Times video, Johnny McDaid talks about distracting Sheeran with Legos, like he’s a small child, to keep him from moving too quickly in the studio.) There are some programmed drums on “Shape Of You,” but most of the percussion is just Sheeran banging on his acoustic guitar. Within 15 minutes of meeting Mac for the first time, they had a beat.

It’s a familiar beat. The drum pattern on “Shape Of You” — or the banging-on-guitar pattern, I guess — is a variation on the dembow riddim, the beat that has powered every reggaeton track ever and that had become awfully common in mainstream American pop by the mid-’00s. Musically, “Shape Of You” is Sheeran’s take on the tropical house sound that was already sweeping through global pop music. In the song’s spareness, there’s a lot of dancehall, but it’s dancehall at least once-removed. It reminds me of the muted, minimal version of the genre that the British producer Palmistry was making around that time. Instead of singing a clean melody over that beat, Sheeran gets into a vaguely dancehall-style vocal cadence — wordy tangles with skipping syncopation. That kind of delivery works great on dancehall, where the patois is usually so thick that most of us can’t make out all the words. It doesn’t work so well when you’re singing in plain English and your lyrics are the dumbest shit in the world.

The “Shape Of You” lyrics are ass. Sorry. Ed Sheeran tells a story about meeting a girl while he’s at a bar with his friends. (You can tell that he’s thinking globally with those words, since he doesn’t say “pub.”) Then they’re on a date, stealing food from a buffet and making out in the back of a cab. Also, they fuck — not in the cab, thankfully, but in Sheeran’s room. Sheeran is able to turn his conversational-everyman style to horny romance pretty easily. There isn’t too much escapism on “Shape Of You,” which is smart. There’s enough specific detail in there, like the bit about dancing to Van The Man on the jukebox, that it feels real. (Van Morrison’s biggest Hot 100 hit, 1970’s “Domino,” peaked at #9. It’s a 7.) The characters aren’t rich or glamorous; they’re just regular people who want to get in each other’s pants. Great! Good for them! But as far as the actual writing, it’s just one clunker after another.

Consider the main line of the fucking chorus: “I’m in love with the shape of you/ We push and pull like a magnet do.” That’s the best they could do? They couldn’t give it one more rewrite? Also, why is it “your love was handmade for somebody like me”? Why not just “me”? Why would the love merely be handmade for someone who belongs to Ed Sheeran’s demographic? And here’s what the characters do on their date: “We talk for hours and hours about the sweet and the sour and how your family is doing OK.” That just sounds boring. If someone offered me a chance to talk to Ed Sheeran for hours and hours about the sweet and the sour and how my family is doing OK, I’d be like, “No thanks, I’m good. I’m really into staring at this blank wall right now. I think I’ll continue to do that for hours and hours instead.”

And then there’s just the simple matter of Ed Sheeran being in love with your body. The Weeknd or Bruno Mars or any of Sheeran’s other A-list pop peers could’ve sung that line and made it sound smooth, but there’s no getting around Sheeran’s fundamental awkwardness. Maybe that was a selling point. Maybe that was what people wanted. If Ed Sheeran’s diction wasn’t so precise, the “Shape Of You” lyrics would be less of an issue. But he sings them all so clearly, and I can’t get past the writing.

Lyrics aside, “Shape Of You” is a clean and efficient little hook machine. The restraint in the production works awfully well. In that Times video — where, incidentally, Johnny McDaid hints that he really hates those lyrics — the three writers talk about adding every little sound in the mix — adding them, subtracting them, bringing everything back for the big finale. There’s a tiny mellotron riff sweetening everything, a staccato handclap, a nervous Afropop-style guitar. They all fit into place like puzzle pieces, or maybe like Legos. They all make sense.

The lyrics remain awful, but I must spotlight the bit where Sheeran sings from the girl’s point of view — “grab on my waist and put that body on me” — and he just sings it in a higher register rather than bringing in a girl to sing that part. It’s like Positive K on “I Got A Man” — a guy doing different voices to play both roles in a flirtatious conversation. I always think that’s a pretty funny tactic. (“I Got A Man” peaked at #14 in 1992. Great song. Positive K is so good at girl-voice rapping that most people who liked that song had no idea that it was him doing both voices. Sheeran can’t do the girl voice that well, so he doesn’t really try.)

“Shape Of You” didn’t take too much work. The writers say that they finished it in 90 minutes and that they went on to write two other songs that same day. Those other two songs went to different artists, and both of them ultimately became singles and charted. First, there was the ballad “The Rest Of My Life,” which became a 2017 Tim McGraw/Faith Hill duet. (“The Rest Of Our Life” peaked at #98. Tim McGraw’s highest-charting lead-artist single is another Faith Hill duet, 1997’s “It’s Your Love,” which peaked at #7. It’s a 6. McGraw was also a guest on Nelly’s #3 hit “Over And Over” in 2004, and that one is an 8. As for Hill, she made it to #2 with 1999’s “Breathe.” It’s another 7.) Later that same day, Sheeran and Mac also co-wrote the track that would eventually become the only real solo hit for Liam Payne, the former One Direction member who suddenly and tragically died last month. Payne recorded “Stack It Up” with a verse from Quavo, who was just in this column for the Migos’ “Bad And Boujee,” and it peaked at #10. (It’s a 5.)

So: A good day’s work. Ed Sheeran didn’t think he had much of anything with “Shape Of You.” He’d already finished work on his album ÷. The night after that writing session, Sheeran played the album for his label bosses. When the record was over, Sheeran also played them “Shape Of You.” At that point, he was apparently still asking if Rihanna was taking submissions. Sheeran’s label guys went nuts. They told him that he should absolutely not give the song away to anyone else and that it should be his single. Sheeran was always reticent about following pop trends, which “Shape Of You” definitely does, but he went along with it. Much later, he claimed that he tried to get a guest verse from former Number Ones artist Jay-Z but that Jay turned him down, telling him that the song didn’t need a rap verse. I honestly cannot imagine a Jay verse on “Shape Of You,” and I’m glad it didn’t happen.

For the “Shape Of You” video, Sheeran went to Seattle and filmed with Jason Koenig, the director who did the clips for Macklemore’s big hits. The video plays out as an extended tribute to the Rocky training montages, except now with romance! Much of it takes place in a boxing gym, an age-old excuse for pop stars to take off their shirts and show that they’re getting in shape. Sheeran truly does look more diesel than you’d expect, but he’s still Ed Sheeran. This means he still looks at least a little bit like an albino toad who’s been stepped on by a toddler — a not-unhandsome squished albino toad, but still. We get a love story between him and onetime Macklemore backup dancer Jennie Pegouskie, and Sheeran should not be anywhere near that lady’s league in a million years. The tone is mostly serious, but it all builds up to a Macklemore-esque twist: Sheeran has been training for an underground basement fight where he puts on a fat suit and gets beat up by a sumo wrestler. It has 6.3 billion views. I don’t even know.

In the lead-up to his ÷ album, Ed Sheeran released two singles on the same day, and one of them was “Shape Of You.” The other was a distinctly different piece of work. “Castle On The Hill” is a grand, elegiac nostalgia-bath about Sheeran’s time growing up and hanging out with friends in the English town of Framingham. (The title is literal. There’s a castle in Framingham. They have castles all over the place in England, like they’re Walmarts. Shit is crazy.) “Castle On The Hill” has big, rushing U2/Coldplay guitars, and Sheeran belts out all its nakedly sentimental lyrics with stadium-status authority.

A digression: They finally put every episode of Homicide: Life On The Street up on Peacock. The other night, I was watching it while stoned, and I just got bottomlessly sad — not because of any of the murders onscreen but because I couldn’t get over the idea that I can never go back to ’90s Baltimore again. Baltimore still exists. Compared to every other place where I’ve ever lived, it hasn’t even changed that much. But it won’t be the exact same place where I grew up, the one that lived in my memory and looks a lot like Homicide. I won’t be that kid again, either. It fucked me up — the feeling that goes beyond nostalgia and into mourning the sheer passage of time. That’s exactly the feeling that Sheeran indulges on “Castle On The Hill.” Sheeran is really good at being gloopy and possibly emotionally manipulative. It works on me.

Sheeran released “Shape Of You” and “Castle On The Hill” together because the two songs represented the different things that he does on the album, and both of them were successful. In the UK, “Shape Of You” and “Castle On The Hill” debuted at #1 and #2, respectively. Over here, “Shape Of You” went straight to the top. “Bad And Boujee” knocked it out and reclaimed the #1 spot for a week, but then “Shape Of You” returned to the top and stayed there for months. Despite the existence of a hit that lingered at #1 for even longer, Billboard eventually named “Shape Of You” the biggest song of 2017. “Castle On The Hill,” meanwhile, debuted at #6 and then fell. (It’s an 8.)

Maybe that was a fork-in-the-road moment. The world liked emotional-balladeer Ed Sheeran just fine, but it loved the version of Sheeran who made ultra-basic, stupid-catchy pop music. “Shape Of You” did what mega-gigantic hit songs do: It became part of the world, as omnipresent as State Farm commercials. It was #1 on pop airplay, adult contemporary airplay, the dance chart. I don’t ride in Ubers very often, but every time I rode in an Uber in 2017, I heard “Shape Of You.” If I were to pull some real music-critic bullshit and attempt to coin “Uber-pop” as a genre — believe me, I’ve considered it — then “Shape Of You” would be its alpha and omega.

Ed Sheeran didn’t have to keep pushing “Shape Of You,” but he kept pushing it anyway. There was that Grammys performance with the loop pedals. The day before the Grammys, he also performed the song on SNL. (Host: Alec Baldwin.) He did “Shape Of You” on kids’ instruments with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots. At the VMAs in September, Sheeran and former Number Ones artist Lil Uzi Vert got together for a stunt-cast medley of “Shape Of You” and Uzi’s “XO Tour Llif3,” two songs that were in the top 10 at the same time. (“XO Tour Llif3” peaked at #7. It’s an 8.)

At the Brit Awards, Sheeran performed both “Castle On The Hill” and a “Shape Of You” remix — the one that featured UK grime star Stormzy, who apparently disagreed with Jay-Z that the song did not need a rap verse. Diplo’s Major Lazer crew did their own “Shape Of You” remix, adding in dancehall artists Nyla and Kranium. (Major Lazer’s highest-charting single, the 2016 Justin Bieber/MØ collab “Cold Water,” peaked at #2. You will not be shocked to learn that Ed Sheeran co-wrote that one.) All those promotional efforts had their intended effect. “Shape Of You” became an unstoppable rolling blockbuster. It dominated charts all over the world. In the US, it hung around in the top 10 for 33 weeks — a new record.

Naturally, someone sued. A couple of songwriters filed a copyright-infringement suit against Sheeran, claiming that he’d ripped off the UK singer Sami Switch’s 2015 song “Oh Why.” Since Ed Sheeran is someone who makes relatively simple pop music in a post-“Blurred Lines” world, lawsuits like that one are inevitable. Sheeran has always been good about fighting those cases, going so far as to take the stand and play his acoustic guitar in a recent trial over his “Thinking Out Loud” writing credits. He won that one. He didn’t have to do all that in the “Shape Of You” lawsuit, and he still won. A British judge ruled in Sheeran’s favor after a couple of months.

Sheeran did, however, give away some “Shape Of You” songwriting credits. When the song came out, lots of people noticed that its pre-chorus — the “your love was handmade” bit — sounded a lot like the hook from TLC’s “No Scrubs.” In that New York Times video, Sheeran says that the interpolation was intentional. But the writers of “No Scrubs” — Xscape members Kandi Burruss and Tiny Cottle, producer Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs — didn’t get songwriting credits on “Shape Of You” until the song had already been out for a while.

Ed Sheeran followed the one-two punch of “Shape Of You” and “Castle On The Hill” with “Galway Girl,” a love song where he’s basically rapping over Irish folk fiddles. That song is ass. Irish people apparently appreciated the pander move. Saoirse Ronan starred in the video, and the song was a big hit in Ireland, as well as the UK and across Europe. But America didn’t care, and “Galway Girl” peaked at #53 over here.

Later in the year, Sheeran also made a couple of big guest appearances. He popped up on his buddy Taylor Swift’s “End Game,” a truly bizarre clusterfuck that required him to kinda-sorta rap alongside future Number Ones artist Future. The song peaked at #18, and it stands today as a glowing monument to what happens when all these people get too far outside their lanes. Fortunately, Sheeran did not rap on the Eminem song “River.” Instead, he just sang the hook, and the song peaked at #11. (Taylor Swift and Eminem have both appeared in this column tons of times, and Swift will be back for tons more.)

When it’s all said and done, “Shape Of You” will almost certainly be the biggest song of Ed Sheeran’s life. The single went diamond in 2019, and it’s since been certified platinum 13 times over. For years, it held the record as the the most-streamed song in Spotify history, and it’s still at #2 on that list. None of Sheeran’s later singles had a hope in hell of becoming that huge. But Ed Sheeran’s imperial era did not end with “Shape Of You.” We’ll see him in this column again.

GRADE: 5/10

BONUS BEATS: Almost immediately after “Shape Of You” came out, little baby Sabrina Carpenter posted a video where she covered the song and mashed it up with “No Scrubs.” This was before the “No Scrubs” writers got credits on “Shape Of You.” Here’s that:

Shape of you/ No scrubs #MusicMonday pic.twitter.com/pmSUyijbeH

— Sabrina Carpenter (@SabrinaAnnLynn) January 23, 2017

(Sabrina Carpenter will eventually appear in this column.)

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s former Number Ones artist Charli XCX dressing up in Ed Sheeran drag to reenact the “Shape Of You” video on a 2018 episode of Lip Sync Battle:

(Charli’s other Lip Sync Battle song, B*witched’s “Cest La Vie,” peaked at #9 in 1998. It’s an 8. As lead artist, Charli’s opponent Rita Ora has a pretty dismal record, peaking at #62 with 2012’s “How We Do (Party).” She did, however, make it to #3 as a guest on Iggy Azalea’s “Black Widow” in 2014. That’s a 6. In one form or another, both Boy George and LL Cool J have appeared in this column.)

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s “Shape Of You” soundtracking a dramatic Jack Harlow entrance in the 2023 straight-to-Hulu White Men Can’t Jump remake:

(Annoyingly, neither Vince Staples nor Teyana Taylor has any Hot 100 hits as lead artist, though Taylor has a feature credit on Kanye West’s “Dark Fantasy,” which peaked at #60 in 2010. Jack Harlow, on the other hand, will appear in this column multiple times.)

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s fan footage of Ed Sheeran and Coldplay’s Chris Martin performing “Yellow” and “Shape Of You” together at the Global Citizen Festival in New York a couple of months ago:

(“Yellow” peaked at #48 in 2001. Coldplay have been in this column once, and they’ll be back.)

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. Come on, buy my book please tonight. Come on, buy my boooook pleeeeease.