Ed Sheeran sees a therapist once a week. “The A Team” singer, 32, turned to counselling after becoming overwhelmed by problems he faced last year including his grief over the cocaine and alcohol-linked death of his best friend Jamal Edwards and health issues being faced by his childhood sweetheart wife Cherry Seaborn.
“I go once a week,” he tells on the latest episode of “The Jonathan Ross Show”, which will be shown on Saturday, April 1 about how therapy has stayed a key part of his life. “Some weeks it’s just complaining about something really insignificant and some weeks it’s digging into heavier stuff. It’s just good to talk. Before I would just not talk to anyone and keep it all bottled up and that’s when you get lower and lower and lower.”
Ed was left devastated when music producer Jamal, who gave him his first big breaks, died aged 31 in February 2022 after a cardiac arrest brought on by cocaine and booze aged 31.
Speaking about how his new track “Eyes Closed” is about his late friend, Ed said, “We both lived in the same area of London and I found after he passed away everywhere I went I thought I’d see him, because it was all the places we went to. The song is essentially that.”
Asked by host Jonathan, 62, if the song is difficult to perform on stage, Ed said, “It’s different now it’s out. I find songs are so personal when you write them and they belong to you. The first time I ever played it I did a gig in Union Chapel I cried when I was introducing it, I cried during it and I cried after it. Because the song still belonged to me, it was still my story.”
Jamal’s death came around the time Ed’s then-pregnant wife Cherry, 30, with whom he has daughters Lyra, two, and 10 month old Jupiter, discovered she had a tumour. Explaining the meaning behind another track on the album, Ed added about “No Strings”, “2022 was a year of lots of things happening with me and my family and I sort of said to my wife, ‘If we can get through this, it’s a breeze from here. Anything can happen from here and we’re good.’ ”
“The Jonathan Ross Show” is on Saturday at 9.40 P.M. on ITV1 and ITVX.
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