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Ed Sheeran · S1 E3
Slim Shady Saved My Voice
A nine-year-old with a stutter learns every word on The Marshall Mathers LP. The stutter disappears
A nine-year-old Ed Sheeran stands in front of his class and tries to read aloud. The words jam in his throat, the other kids stare, and he sits down before he's finished the first sentence.
"You Need Me, I Don't Need You" (Ed Sheeran, official music video, 2011). Watch the speed of Ed's delivery: the rapping, the beatboxing, the relentless flow. Every syllable landing on the beat like a drum hit. That's the kid who cured a stutter by rapping along to Eminem in his bedroom.
You Need Me, I Don't Need You, Ed Sheeran (2011)
This track is the clearest evidence of what Eminem did to Ed Sheeran's vocal cords. Ed raps, sings, and beatboxes at a pace most pop singers can't touch, building the entire thing live with a loop pedal. The sign language interpreter in the video matches him word for word, and the speed of her hands tells you everything about the speed of his mouth. That delivery started with a nine-year-old rapping along to his uncle's copy of The Marshall Mathers LP.
Sources
Nolan, David. "Ed Sheeran: A+." Omnibus Press, 2014.
Sheeran, Ed. Interview with Zane Lowe, BBC Radio 1, 2011.
The Block
Ed's stutter wasn't mild. He struggled to get through basic conversations at school, and reading aloud in class was humiliating. His parents tried speech therapy, but nothing worked until his uncle handed him a CD that had nothing to do with therapy.
Sources
Sheeran, Ed. Interview on The Jonathan Ross Show, ITV, 2014.
Nolan, David. "Ed Sheeran: A+." Omnibus Press, 2014.
“My uncle bought me The Marshall Mathers LP when I was nine. He told my dad, this guy's the next Bob Dylan, you gotta let him listen. And by learning every single word on that album, I was able to get rid of my stutter.”
— Ed Sheeran, The Howard Stern Show, May 2023
TAP TO REVEAL: Why did Eminem's rapping fix a stutter when speech therapy couldn't?
Two Languages
The Eminem influence didn't just fix Ed's speech. It gave him a second musical language. Damien Rice taught him vulnerability with a guitar. Eminem taught him that words could hit like punches.
Sources
Nolan, David. "Ed Sheeran: A+." Omnibus Press, 2014.
The Eminem Effect
Remember the Name (feat. Eminem & 50 Cent), Ed Sheeran (2019)
Full circle. The kid who cured his stutter by rapping along to Eminem grew up and got Eminem on his own track. "Remember the Name" features Ed, Eminem, and 50 Cent trading verses, and Ed doesn't flinch. He holds his own next to the man who taught him how to speak.
Remember the Name (feat. Eminem & 50 Cent), Ed Sheeran (2019)
Ed opens his verse with a confident, rapid-fire delivery that owes everything to a nine-year-old in a Suffolk bedroom. Read Eminem's verse alongside Ed's and you can hear the lineage: the rhythmic patterns, the internal rhymes, the way both of them treat syllables like instruments.
Which specific Eminem album did Ed Sheeran memorize to cure his childhood stutter?
Ed has a guitar, a voice that can rap Eminem at full speed, and a head full of Damien Rice melodies. Next episode: at thirteen, he presses record on a borrowed laptop, and the first song that comes out is terrible. He records another one anyway.
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