Playing an event as major as the Super Bowl Halftime Show is a career-defining feat — but Ed Sheeran isn’t really interested. During a recent interview with SiriusXM ahead of a performance in New York, the musician told Andy Cohen that he would consider joining someone else’s headlining show but doesn’t see the appeal in being the big-name performer himself. “I don’t think that anyone wants to see me do the Super Bowl either,” he admitted. “I think that would be the only way that I would do it, is if I was joining someone else.”
Sheeran has a few reasons for keeping his interest in a halftime show performance at bay, one being how overtly British he is. “I think it’s an American thing,” he added. “I don’t have pizazz.” During the interview, he pointed to grand performances from Prince, Michael Jackson, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and The Weeknd as the standard for these shows.
“All of these amazing performers, I’m just not that. I’m not gonna have dancers on stage. I’m not gonna have fireworks and blah blah,” Sheeran said. “I just can’t, that’s not me.” His usual performances, almost entirely held at sold-out stadiums packed with tens of thousands of people, still primarily feature himself with his loop pedal. And those stadium shows often conclude with a small fireworks display, so maybe he just isn’t giving himself enough credit.
But Sheeran still wants to be able to say that he has played the Super Bowl, and making a guest appearance with someone else could be his loophole. The singer revealed that there had once been a conversation about him joining Coldplay for “Thinking Out Loud” when the band — also British — headlined in 2016. That was also the year that Beyoncé and Bruno Mars made an appearance during the halftime show and effectively eclipsed Coldplay completely. It seems for the best that Sheeran sat that one out, but maybe he’ll get another chance to crash someone else’s performance.
In fact, Taylor Swift might be kind enough to invite him out if she eventually brings a condensed version of the Eras tour to the Super Bowl Halftime Show. During the interview, Sheeran shared that he hasn’t yet re-recorded his “End Game” verse for Reputation (Taylor’s Version), but he is trying to find some time to see her live show when it hits the UK next year. He also appeared on Red (Taylor’s Version) for the re-recorded version of “Everything Has Changed.”
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Sheeran has been busy with an Eras tour of his own this year, the Mathematics tour, now that the fifth and final entry in his math symbol-themed album, Subtract, has been released. Having planned out the album themes more than a decade ago, the musician was working away at the final installment over several years. But two sobering events — his best friend Jamal Edwards died in 2021 around the same time that his wife was diagnosed with cancer while pregnant with their second child — led to him scrapping what he had and creating an album about love, life, and grief.
But he still held onto those songs and plans to release them in the coming months. “It’s an album about Autumn,” Sheeran explained, noting that it won’t be arriving in October, but isn’t too far off. “I kind of have no expectations for it. It was the album I was trying to make and then – [Subtract] happened. I kind of have finished it over the last year and yeah, it’s ready to come out, so I’m gonna put it out.”
