14 febrúar 2012
Jake Gosling
Ed Sheeran’s phenomenal success depended on hard work, a few lucky breaks, and the talents of long‑term co‑writer and producer Jake Gosling.
Photos: Carey Sheffield
Few artists in recent times have experienced the kind of vertigo‑inducing rise that Ed Sheeran has enjoyed. When, in September 2011, his debut album, the symbolically titled , entered the album chart at number one, enjoying first week sales of over 100,000 before quickly going platinum, it seemed as if the 20‑year‑old singer‑songwriter had appeared from nowhere.
But Sheeran’s back story is actually one of an impressive level of dedication and dogged determination. As a teenager, inspired by Irish singer Damien Rice, he picked up a guitar and began writing songs while still at school in Framlingham, in Suffolk. As soon as he left, he hit the road, appearing at open mic nights around the country and hawking CDs out of his rucksack. In 2009 alone, as the legend now goes, he performed a staggering 312 gigs.
En route, he showed real bravery in stepping on a plane to Los Angeles at the age of 19, to perform solo in low‑life bars, before by chance encountering his sometime mentor, actor/musician Jamie Foxx, who took him in and recorded him at his home studio, with Sheeran kipping on the Hollywood star’s sofa.
However, none of the recordings Sheeran made with Foxx were to make their way onto . Instead, the album’s sessions were rooted in Sheeran’s relatively long‑term relationship with producer and co‑writer Jake Gosling, who runs his own Sticky Studios from a converted barn situated in an apple orchard in the small Surrey village of Windlesham. “It’s a great location,” Gosling enthuses. “It has a real country vibe. People love coming here, ‘cause it’s cut off and you’re not interrupted by anything, so it’s great for writing and all the rest of it.”
Previously, Gosling was renowned for his work in UK urban music, producing rappers Wiley, Kano and Wretch 32, while remixing tracks for the likes of Lady Gaga and Timbaland. He first met Sheeran four years ago, when their shared publisher dispatched the prodigious 16‑year‑old to Sticky Studios for a writing session.
“This little ginger kid turned up and he was really confident for his age,” the producer remembers. “He’d just moved to London and he was living above a pub. We sat down, and we were talking about him moving to London and that became ‘The City’, which was the first thing we wrote together. I felt his lyrics were just insanely good.”
One characteristic feature of Sheeran’s music is his blurring of acoustic balladry and hip‑hop, which finds him switching between sensitive singer‑songwriter and adept rapper. Gosling says that this cross‑pollination of styles was something he encouraged from the moment the pair first started working together. “He loves urban music… he loved Wiley and all the rappers I’d worked with,” he says. “But I also love folk, so we connected on a musical level straight away. It was a perfect fusion of the two together, really. We were trying to create something new.”
Mate’s Rates
Sticky Studios is based around an old DDA console, and Jake Gosling’s preferred monitors are JBLs of even older vintage.
Before came out, Ed Sheeran released a series of EPs between 2009 and 2011, all recorded with Jake Gosling at Sticky Studios. Soon after starting to work together, the pair settled on a loose arrangement where the singer would give the studio owner £1000 to cover an EP’s recording costs, which he would quickly recoup, before turning a modest profit selling them at gigs and through iTunes.
“The only way he lived was through selling his EPs,” Gosling points out. “Because I believed in what he was doing, I was like, ‘Well, look, if you can cover my cost on the studio, I won’t recharge you, ‘cause I love what you’re doing.’ He’d get a couple of thousand printed up and just sell them at gigs everywhere he went. If he made 30 quid or 40 quid, he was over the moon about it.”