A verdict is imminent in the six-year copyright infringement case against Ed Sheeran, which is being played out in a Manhattan federal court. If a guilty verdict comes in against Sheeran, however, the 32-year-old singer-songwriter says he'll be washing his hands of more than just this longtime legal battle and leaving the music industry entirely. "If that happens, I'm done, I'm stopping," Sheeran said Monday, per the Daily Mail, via the Independent. "I find it really insulting to devote my whole life to being a performer and a songwriter and have someone diminish it."
Sheeran is accused of ripping off Marvin Gaye's 1973 hit "Let's Get It On," with the song's co-writer, Ed Townsend, claiming Sheeran lifted the "heart" of Gaye's tune by using its "harmonic progressions" and "melodic and rhythmic elements" in Sheeran's own 2014 hit "Thinking Out Loud" (much more on the case here). As he reassesses his life in music, Sheeran is also getting vulnerable in his new Disney+ docuseries, Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All, whose release Wednesday shows the singer talking about his reaction to his wife's cancer diagnosis last year.
"It was horrible," an emotional Sheeran says in the first episode, per People, noting that he wrote seven songs in four hours to cope with the pain of what was happening to wife Cherry Seaborn. "When something really intense happens to him, he writes a song," Seaborn notes. The "Shape of You" singer adds that his wife is "the most amazing thing in my life that nobody really knows about. Everything in my life got so much better when she got into it."
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Meanwhile, Sheeran has a lot to keep him busy as he waits to see what happens in court. He'll join Alanis Morissette on Sunday as a guest judge on American Idol, filling in for regular judges Lionel Richie and Katy Perry, who will be in the UK for King Charles III's coronation, per CNN. The singer might also soon have a moving day on his hands: The Wall Street Journal reports Sheeran has rented a $36,0000-a-month apartment in the new Pierhouse development in New York City's Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. (More Ed Sheeran stories.)
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