Ed Sheeran Wants You To Embrace Your Weirdness
Ed Sheehan
Ed Sheeran has a lot of success these days, I am not a fan at all but, on Monday, he had a few interesting and weird things to say to the Hollywood Reporter before being honored at the American Institute for ‘Stuttering’s Freeing Voices Changing Lives’ Benefit Gala.
About self-esteem and being ‘normal’:
‘Most of the people I knew that were normal in school are all pretty dull right now — they go to the gym four times a week and look at themselves in the mirror a lot, but they don’t really have a lot to say.… Most of the people that are successful started life off as a weird kid with no friends.’
Yes, look at Bill Gates, I imagine him to be an awkward kid and now he is the richest man in the world, but don’t make a rule out of this Ed, many weird kids don’t turn so well, look what happened to Macaulay Culkin!
But Sheeran insists, he was one of the kind, and he became very successful:
‘I was a very, very weird child. I had a port-wine stain birthmark on my face that I got lasered off when I was very young; one day, they forgot to put the anesthetic on, and ever since then, I had a stutter. I also had very big, blue NHS glasses — NHS is the National Health Service, one day I hope you’ll have the same! And I lacked an eardrum on one side of my ear, so stuttering was actually the least of my problems!’
He lacked an eardrum? That’s complete weirdness especially for a musician. But what about this stutter? Sheeran said he didn’t cure it through speech therapy or homeopathy – homeopathy doesn’t cure anything to begin with and certainly not a stutter and that was truly a weird idea – however his secret was rap music:
‘My Uncle Jim told my dad that Eminem was the next Bob Dylan — it’s pretty similar, it’s all just storytelling — so my dad bought me The Marshall Mathers LP when I was nine years old, not knowing what was on it. I learned every word of it, back to front, by the time I was ten. He raps very fast and melodically and percussively, and it helped me get rid of the stutter.’
Eminem the next Dylan? Is Sheeran’s uncle SNL’s drunk uncle or what? But it certainly worked for him, and he wanted to reassured the young people attending the gala, since ‘Stuttering is not a thing you have to be worried about at all,’… and since ‘one of the cool kids from school is now does his plumbing!’
Sheeran has a simple recipe for success, be uncool: ‘If you try to be the cool kid in class, you’ll end up very boring and doing plumbing for someone who apparently wasn’t that cool. Be yourself. Embrace your quirks. Being weird is a wonderful thing.… I have a f—ing football team now, that’s pretty cool!’ and he went on and on about this don’t-be-cool-embrace-your-weirdness business for some time, so may be he was as drunk as his uncle.
