Edward Christopher Sheeran, MBE (born 17 February 1991) is an English singer-songwriter. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play, No. 5 Collaborations Project. After signing with Asylum Records, his debut album, + (pronounced "plus"), was released in September 2011. It topped the UK and Australian charts, reached number five in the US, and has since been certified eight-times platinum in the UK.
The album contains the single "The A Team", which earned him the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. In 2012, Sheeran won the Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. "The A Team" was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, where he performed the song with Elton John.
Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Fred Gibson was already a successful pop songwriter when his galvanizing trilogy of “Actual Life” albums began emerging in surprisingly rapid succession as the pandemic lifted.
Released over just 18 months, the albums were a sort of living musical diary, filled with sophisticated dance/house/electronic-leaning sounds but also a sense of emotion and songcraft rare for the genre, which usually tends to be production-based more than song-based.
Built around voice notes from himself and friends, internet posts and samples of other artists’ work, Fred’s musicality, gently pulsating beats and melancholic songwriting — he’s cowritten hits for Ed Sheeran, Rita Ora and others, and was mentored by his childhood neighbor, Brian Eno — made many of these digitally based songs as vividly human as any singer-songwriter’s.
Gibson’s star deservedly rose quickly as those albums sunk in, and he’s been on a sort of collaboration binge ever since, playing roof-raising DJ sets at Madison Square Garden and Coachella with Skrillex and Four Tet, collaborating on entire albums with them, as well as Eno and Romy from the XX, and dropping stray tracks or remixes or features seemingly every month.
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