Ed Sheeran Defends Himself in Court, With His Guitar
Ed Sheeran testified with a guitar on Thursday at a closely watched copyright trial, defending his hit ballad “Thinking Out Loud” against an accusation that he had copied it from Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.”
Cradling his acoustic instrument in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, Mr. Sheeran demonstrated the four-chord sequence at the heart of his song, which he said was written in a few hours in early 2014 with his friend and longtime collaborator Amy Wadge. He recounted just stepping out of the shower of his home when he heard Ms. Wadge strumming the chords, and he remembered thinking: “We need to do something with that.”
The song went to No. 1 in Britain and No. 2 in the United States, and in 2016 won a Grammy Award for song of the year. But in 2017, the family of Ed Townsend, Gaye’s co-writer, sued for copyright infringement, saying that the chord progression, with its syncopated pattern, was copied from “Let’s Get It On.”
Mr. Sheeran has been a regular presence at the trial, which began on Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, listening to the testimony of his accusers, who include Kathryn Griffin Townsend, Mr. Townsend’s daughter.
Source: The New York Times
