Tear Jerker / Ed Sheeran

• Try not to tear up at least once during "The A Team."
  • It's worse if you know the song is based on a real person.
  • "It's too cold outside, for angels to fly..."
  • There's one video of a girl from Maryland performing a cover of it. Not so bad, right? That girl committed suicide three months after the video was posted.
  • And then Birdy covered it live.
  • The song was used as the basis for "Little Lady" on the No.5 Collaborations Project EP. Just when you think it couldn't get darker... it got darker.
    • First Line: "Listen, Little Lady this is just the worst way to spend your birthday-"
    • Last lines of last verse: "And in the moment of rage, he brutally murders his niece and dumps her body in the boot of his Merc in the street. Little lady left this earth in the worst way, all because she got a card on her 13th birthday"
• "Afire Love" can bring on the waterworks, especially if you have a loved one who died from/has Alzheimer's or dementia. (Or if you recognise the source of the sample, itself a colossal tearjerker.)
• The ending of "Small Bump" a song about a man anticipating the birth of his child only to reveal the mother miscarried
• Triona Priestly, a 15-year-old with cystic fibrosis, revealed that her final wish was to hear him sing for her. After a Twitter campaign, he called up her hospital room and sang "Little Bird." During the song, she drifted off into sleep and died within minutes of the event.
• "All of the Stars," especially in the context of the story it was written for.
• "Don't" when you take the lyrics into context since it's about Ellie Goulding cheating on Ed with Niall Horan. Really gives a sad meaning to the line, "I never really saw him as a threat."
• The sheer emotion of "Give Me Love" for anyone who's had a relationship fall apart.
• The entirety of the song "Supermarket Flowers" will have people dissolving into tears. It's about Ed's late grandmother, who passed away during the production of the album.
  • The first time anyone outside of Ed and his production team heard the song was when he played it at his nan’s funeral.
• During Ed's appeal film for Comic Relief 2017 where he went to Liberia to witness the aftermath of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, he visibly tears up when trying to talk about what he's seen during his time there. He was so moved that he personally paid for five street children to stay in a safe house after hearing about how they had been beaten and raped by older boys in the area.
• In March 2021, Ed performed a new song titled “Visiting Hours” in honor of his close friend Michael Gudinski who had passed away. During the performance, he visibly chokes up and stops to compose himself, before starting again. By the end of the song, he’s in tears. The line “I wish that Heaven had visiting hours” (and the song as a whole) can cause someone to dissolve into sobs, especially if they lost someone close to them like a friend or grandparent.

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