Ed Sheeran spoke at a New York fundraiser for the American Institute Of Stuttering about his childhood stutter, and how Eminem helped him get over it.
The singer-songwriter was at the Freeing Voices Changing Lives Benefit Gala and gave a speech about suffering from the affliction, alongside actress Emily Blunt.
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“My Uncle Jim told my dad that Eminem was the next Bob Dylan — it’s pretty similar, it’s all just storytelling — so my dad bought me ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’ when I was nine years old, not knowing what was on it,” he told the crowd. “I learned every word of it, back to front, by the time I was ten. He raps very fast and melodically and percussively, and it helped me get rid of the stutter.”
He continued: “”The people I went to school with that were the most normal and were the coolest when we grew up — I was telling Emily earlier that one of the cool kids from school now does my plumbing! That’s a fact! If you try to be the cool kid in class, you’ll end up very boring and doing plumbing for someone who apparently wasn’t that cool. Be yourself. Embrace your quirks. Being weird is a wonderful thing.… I have a fucking football team now, that’s pretty cool!”
As The Hollywood Reporter notes, Sheeran also performed at the event, playing ‘Thinking Out Loud’, a medley of ‘Don’t’, ‘Loyal’ and ‘No Diggity’, and Irish traditional song ‘The Parting Glass’.