Ed Sheeran Shares Which Songs 'Almost Didn't Make It' And Why

Creating an album and choosing the perfect songs and track order can be a complicated and ever-changing process. Even for a hitmaker like Ed Sheeran , who has released seven studio albums throughout his career, has faced tough choices on which songs to include on a project and which don't make the cut. In a new video, he is sharing why some of his songs — including a few of his biggest hits — "almost didn't make it."

Sheeran made the surprising revelation in a video shared to X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday (August 8), sharing that some of his biggest hits like "Shape of You" and "Thinking Out Loud" nearly didn't make it on their respective albums.

"'Shape of You' almost didn't make it because I didn't write it for Divide , I originally wrote it for Little Mix and then I was gonna pitch it to Rihanna ," he said, before revealing that "2step," from 2021's Equals, "didn't feel necessarily cohesive with the record at the time and then we sort of fiddled about with the track lists and then it worked."

Another track that caused a bit of difficulty is "You Need Me, I Don't Need You" from his debut album Plus .

"We just couldn't get the recording right on it," he said. "I'd written that song when I was 15 and it was more of a live song and we couldn't get the energy, but thankfully we got the energy [in the final recording]."

Some of the songs were added "so late" in the process that Sheeran wasn't sure they had time to include them on the album's original release.

"'I'm a Mess' was so late in the album process I didn't even know if we had time to even get it in for printing," he said, adding that another of his biggest hits was also written that week and nearly didn't make it in time for 2014's Multiply . "'Thinking Out Loud,' again, was written the same week as 'I'm a Mess' and we thought it might go on as a bonus later on."

The English singer-songwriter even shared that he held on to one of his songs for over a decade before finally releasing it on his 2023 album Subtract , which was originally planned as his second album.

"'The Hills of Aberfeldy' I wrote for the original Subtract ," he said. "I wrote that in 2012, and I thought that it would go Plus and then Subtract . So I thought Subtract would be coming out in sort of 2012, 2013 and it didn't and I held on to that song until it eventually did in 2023."