Over two weeks in a downtown Manhattan courtroom, Sheeran,
one of music’s biggest global hitmakers, testified — often with a guitar in
hand — that Thinking Out Loud had been created independently one evening with
his friend and longtime collaborator Amy Wadge. The song was inspired, he said,
by the decadeslong loves that he and Wadge observed among elders in their
families.
The two tracks share a similar syncopated chord pattern that
the family of Ed Townsend, Gaye’s co-writer, which filed the suit, called the
“heart” of Let’s Get It On. Sheeran and his lawyers never denied that the
chords in the two songs are similar, but called them commonplace musical
building blocks that have turned up in dozens of other songs.
The case, which was filed in 2017 and had been delayed in
part by the coronavirus pandemic, involved questions of originality in pop
music, and whether the use of basic musical elements, like chord progressions
and simple rhythmic patterns, can be owned by a single creator or are free for
any musician to use and adapt.
The jury, which deliberated for around three hours, found
that Sheeran had created the song independently.
“I am obviously very happy with the outcome of the case,”
Sheeran said in a statement that he read outside the courthouse. “At the same
time, I am unbelievably frustrated that baseless claims like this are allowed
to go to court at all.
“We have spent the last eight years talking about two songs
with dramatically different lyrics, melodies and four chords which are also
different and used by songwriters every day, all over the world,” Sheeran
continued. “These chords are common building blocks which were used to create
music long before Let’s Get It On was written and will be used to make music
long after we are all gone."
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