By admin 
On Friday, the high temperature in Charlotte was north of 90 and it felt like summer was never going to end. But by Saturday night, Bank of America Stadium was filling up for Ed Sheeran’s concert with people who looked like they were steeling themselves for a Panthers game in December.
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Puffer jackets. Parkas. Ski caps. Hoodies. Just before the show started, I noticed a man sitting in the row behind me blowing into his hands and rubbing them together before the show.
“It’s not the warmest day in the world,” Sheeran would later acknowledge. “I mean, for me, as an Englishman, this is our summer, basically. But it’s not the warmest day in the world.” Halfway through his 29-song set, the real-feel temperature would dip into the 40s.
Fortunately, the British pop star had brought plenty of fire.
Literally.
Flames shot up around him during “Don’t,” erupted from towers and turrets during “Give Me Love” and “I See Fire,” and roared again during the finale, “Bad Habits,” which also featured fireworks. On a night this cold, the bursts of flame were almost as welcome as the spectacle, providing a few seconds of actual warmth to fans on the field and in the lower bowl.
The most impressive thing about Saturday’s concert, however, wasn’t how much heat Sheeran generated with his production.
It was how much energy he generated himself — partly through storytelling and carefully orchestrated audience participation, but mainly through sheer musicianship, with an acoustic guitar and a device at his feet.
That device, of course, is a loop station, which allows Sheeran to record guitar parts, percussion and vocals in real time, then layer them together to create the sound of a much larger ensemble. He demonstrated how it worked from the outset, assembling “Castle on the Hill” and “Shivers” by pressing buttons with his feet to record and play back sounds, then adding more layers.
“Everything you hear tonight is completely live,” he assured the crowd. “There is no backing track whatsoever. It’s made live on the spot, controlled with my feet, loop-layered, and at the end it’s deleted — and it won’t be the same at the next gig.”
It’s not news that he does this. But even after all these years, I still occasionally found myself wondering how on earth he was producing some of those sounds.
Watching him build arrangements from scratch on songs like “Sapphire” and “Shape of You” was almost as entertaining as hearing the finished products. During “Eyes Closed” (which he prefaced by explaining it was written while he grappled with the death of his friend Jamal Edwards), Sheeran added and removed layers of sound on the fly, giving the song a sense of movement that a prerecorded backing track couldn’t have provided.
If you were close enough, you could observe some of his fancy footwork when he moved to a small circular stage near midfield, where the loop station wasn’t obscured by other equipment as it was on the main stage. Sadly, though, the giant video screens only occasionally showed him operating the pedals for all to see.
I expressed similar disappointment after he played at uptown’s Spectrum Center in 2017. Yet this was a significantly better concert than that one — and, at nearly three hours, much, much longer.
Sheeran clearly was in no hurry. I’d venture to guess that throughout the evening, he spent close to an hour just talking between songs.
At one point, he even admitted: “My manager says that I talk too much on stage.”
On Saturday at the stadium, he spent long stretches talking about growing up in a small English farming town, playing open mic nights in London, discovering other cultures through music and food, learning to write songs for other performers, and his experiences with grief and loss.
He also talked, very affectionately, about Charlotte.
Sheeran said he’d slept in an Airstream at the stadium Friday night, then gone for a run around the city Saturday morning. (I can imagine more than a few die-hards wishing they’d happened upon him doing that.) During previous visits here, he said, he’d mostly experienced Charlotte after dark and enjoyed finally seeing more of it in daylight.
The singer called the city a “really, really beautiful place,” and explained that he has “an affinity to the Carolinas” at least in part because his wife of almost eight years, Cherry Seaborn, attended Duke University. (The crowd’s mixed response — including a smattering of playful boos — amused him. “People aren’t sure how to feel about that. I understand, I understand.”)
He also recalled coming through Charlotte 14 years earlier as an opening act for Snow Patrol, when he was still trying to introduce American audiences to his breakthrough smash “The A Team.”
And before performing “Life Goes On,” which he recorded with friend Luke Combs in 2023, Sheeran revealed that the N.C.-native country star had called him earlier in the day to remind him that he was performing in the home stadium of Combs’ beloved Carolina Panthers.
These were the kinds of details that made the evening feel like more than just another stop on a massive international tour.
So did the occasional imperfection.
During the second song, “Shivers,” the live video feed froze as Sheeran was assembling the song on his loop station. At that, the giant screens reverted to a graphic inviting fans to request a song, before a smaller video image appeared. Sheeran, for his part, kept right on working his pedals, seemingly unbothered, and the feed returned to normal after about a minute.
Later, shortly after launching into “Sing,” he abruptly stopped when he realized he was using the wrong guitar.
“This is my bad,” he admitted, explaining that he’d added the previous song, “Supermarket Flowers,” to the setlist at the last minute, apparently confusing both himself and his guitar tech.
The crowd didn’t seem to mind. Moments like that, in fact, made the evening feel less pre-programmed.
There were certainly some highly produced, big-budget trappings on display, though.
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Just five songs in, during “Don’t,” a retractable bridge extended from the main stage across the stadium floor, allowing Sheeran to walk to a small circular platform near midfield and give people in different parts of the stadium a closer look at him. Once he reached it, the bridge retracted, leaving him surrounded by fans. (He made the trip a couple more times over the course of the evening.)
In addition to all those flames, there were plentiful fireworks, erupting during the choruses of his opening song, “Castle on the Hill,” and bursting in the air later to support hits like “Sapphire” and “Galway Girl,” with green bursts accenting the choruses of the latter.
Another striking difference between the 2017 arena show in Charlotte and this one: The guy who once seemed determined to prove he didn’t need a band has now discovered that occasionally using one makes his show better.
“A lot of these songs are written and designed to be played on a loop pedal,” Sheeran said after performing his first 11 songs entirely solo. “But there are certain songs in my catalog of songs that, I’ve got to be honest, sound rubbish on a loop pedal.” Then he brought out a backing band for a handful of songs, including renditions of “Nancy Mulligan” and “Galway Girl” that incorporated drums, keys, bass, guitar and violin in temporarily turning Bank of America Stadium into a cavernous Irish pub.
At the same time, Sheeran is still just as comfortable stripping everything away, leaving only his guitar and voice for songs like “The A Team” and “Life Goes On.”
And while the acoustic ballads offered some of the night’s loveliest moments — particularly his eye-moistening re-creations of “Photograph” and “Perfect” — Sheeran was equally adept at getting tens of thousands of people to get loud and go nuts.
As he teed up “Sapphire,” the singer told fans: “It’s got one word that you need to sing, just one word. You don’t need to sing the whole thing. You just need to scream out one word. And when I say scream it, I mean, I don’t need you to sing it in tune. I need you to just scream it. I need to hear the volume of it.”
Fans complied.
Later, before “Celestial,” Sheeran told a long, funny story about trying to get an audience in his hometown to jump during the chorus. The younger fans had enthusiastically obeyed, he said, while many older concertgoers had stood there looking bewildered.
“When you have 50% of a crowd jumping and 50% of a crowd not jumping,” he said, “it’s just weird. I don’t know what else to say.”
He wasn’t going to let Charlotte make the same mistake — and when the chorus arrived, the crowd jumped so enthusiastically that the stadium very noticeably shook.
All of that helps explain why the new show was such an improvement. Not simply because it was longer, but because Sheeran has gotten better at varying the experience, making a much bigger and more elaborate concert feel more personal, more spontaneous and more musically satisfying than his comparatively stripped-down arena show nine years ago.
That’s a genuine achievement.
So, too, is spending an hour bantering between songs. And while his storytelling occasionally tested the audience’s patience, it mostly justified itself; in many cases, the stories behind the songs made his songwriting more meaningful.
For all that talking, though, there was one subject Sheeran conspicuously avoided: the Macklemore controversy.
As has been widely reported, in September, Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s U.S. tour following onstage remarks supporting Palestine. Sheeran said the decision was made by the tour’s promoter, not him, and that he’d unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a resolution with venue owners and other parties. Several other performers, including Finneas, Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe and members of the Irish group Beoga, subsequently withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore.
The dispute raised uncomfortable questions about the limits of political expression on a concert stage — questions Sheeran did not directly address Saturday night.
About an hour and 15 minutes into his set, he did say, “I’ve been in the news quite a lot in the last month.” Then he quickly segued into introducing a lengthy story about copyright litigation, an old phone and messages he’d rediscovered from his late friend Jamal Edwards, who died in 2022.
The story ultimately led into his 2025 ballad “Old Phone,” illustrating how painful experiences can produce meaningful songs.
I bring that up not because I’m trying to take away anything from the nearly three hours Sheeran spent making people sing, laugh, jump, and sometimes get a little emotional. I mention it because it was the elephant in the stadium — and because it gave his broader message about what concerts can accomplish in a divided world an added layer of meaning.
“The crowds are so diverse,” he said late in the show. “They’re so diverse. They’re people from all backgrounds, all beliefs, and they all stand next to each other, and they all enjoy something together, and they all can agree on one thing for a night. And I think it’s super-amazing that this can still happen.
“You know, the world is seriously divided, and there are places where we can all stand next to each other and just feel love.”
It’s a sentiment worth remembering long after the fireworks have faded and the controversy surrounding his tour has become yesterday’s news.
Ed Sheeran’s setlist
1. “Castle on the Hill”
2. “Shivers”
3. “The A Team”
4. “Sapphire”
5. “Don’t”
6. “Eyes Closed”
7. “Life Goes On”
8. “Kiss Me”
9. “Supermarket Flowers”
10. “Sing”
11. “Give Me Love”
12. “Galway Girl”
13. “Nancy Mulligan”
14. “I Don’t Care”
15. “Old Phone”
16. “Camera”
17. “Celestial”
18. “Photograph”
19. Medley: “Eastside” / “2002” / “Cold Water” / “Little Things” / “Love Yourself”
20. “Thinking Out Loud”
21. “Perfect”
22. “I See Fire”
23. “I’m a Mess”
24. “Bloodstream”
25. “Afterglow”
Encore
26. “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You”
27. “Shape of You”
28. “Azizam”
29. “Bad Habits”
This story was originally published October 18, 2026 at 6:57 AM with the headline “During chilly Charlotte show, Ed Sheeran talked about almost everything. Almost..”
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