Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran has won the song of the year award at the 2016 Grammy awards in Los Angeles, beating competition including Kendrick Lamar’s Alright and Taylor Swift’s Blank Space.
The song, cowritten with Amy Wadge, reached No 2 in the Billboard Hot 100 – holding down that position for eight consecutive weeks – and No 1 in the UK, where it chalked up 52 consecutive weeks in the top 40 in June 2015.
The song, which featured on Sheeran’s album x, was actually written after the album had finished. Wadge told the Western Mail: “His album was finished and I was just going to his house to have some chilling-out time with my mate – it wasn’t ever supposed to be a songwriting session. But when Ed went for a shower, I picked up a guitar which Harry Styles had bought him and I played two lines. Ed came running downstairs and said, ‘What’s that? We have to do something with that.’ We went for dinner with his mum and dad and then came back and wrote the song, which Ed recorded on his phone straight away.”
Sheeran was also nominated for record of the year and best pop solo performance, in both cases for Thinking Out Loud.
The other nominees for song of the year were Alright, by Kendrick Lamar; Blank Space, by Taylor Swift; Girl Crush, by Little Big Town; and See You Again, by Wiz Khalifa featuring Charlie Puth.
