Read Taylor Swift’s tribute to Ed Sheeran for TIME’s ‘Most Influential People’ list

Swift congratulates Sheeran on 'the legacy you’ve already built'

Taylor Swift has written a tribute to Ed Sheeran for TIME Magazine‘s annual ‘Most Influential People in the World’ list.

The TIME 100 features a mix of musicians, artists, sportspersons and world leaders, including Theresa May, US President Donald Trump and North Korea supreme leader Kim Jong-un.

Chance the Rapper makes the list, with Common praising how the Chicago musician “upends expectations about what artists, especially hip-hop artists, can do.” Tina Fey writes about Donald Glover’s achievements, saying: “He embodies his generation’s belief that people can be whatever they want and change what it is they want, at any time.”

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On Sheeran, Swift writes: “As a young, precocious redheaded boy growing up in Framlingham, Suffolk, Ed Sheeran decided he wanted to be a musician. He started writing songs and playing instruments like so many hopefuls do, but something very different happened that would set in motion one of the most impressive self-made careers in music.”

Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran

She continues: “Whether by choice or an unconscious evolution, when he decided on his musical ambitions, Ed became less of a boy and more of a tank. He is protected by an impenetrable and ever-present armor of enthusiasm that has helped him endure any setback, letdown or underestimation. His reaction to any idea that fails is to almost immediately come up with a new one. He’s like a fighter who pops back up on his feet before you even noticed he’d been knocked down.”

“A few years ago, in a rare moment of admitting feeling defeated, Ed said to me, ‘I’m never going to win a Grammy.’ Yes, you are, I said. You’re going to sweep the whole thing one of these years. It was a few weeks later when he met me in a dance-shoe store in London, where I was picking out rehearsal outfits, and said, ‘You have to hear this.’ It was a song he’d just finished called ‘Thinking Out Loud,’ which went on to win Song of the Year at the Grammy Awards in 2016.”

“Congratulations to my friend Ed, for the legacy you’ve already built and the brilliant hook you probably just came up with five minutes ago,” Swift concludes.

See the full TIME 100 here.

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Other entries include Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, Barcelona FC footballer Neymar, basketball player LeBron James, actors Riz Ahmed, Margot Robbie and Emma Stone, and television host James Corden. There are also spots for boxer Conor McGregor, Alicia Keys, Demi Lovato and Ryan Reynolds.

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