“Always Been a Dream Of Mine”: Ed Sheeran Performs at Nashville's Bluebird Café and Tootsies Bar - Is He Teasing a Country Album?

Could Ed Sheeran be making his long-awaited foray into country music?

In many ways, the ‘Shape of You’ megastar has already ventured into Music City, with Ed Sheeran penning hits for the likes of Kenny Chesney, Kelsea Ballerini and many more. At the 2023 ACM Awards, Sheeran teamed up with his good friend, Luke Combs, for a spellbinding duet of his grief-stricken ballad, ‘Life Goes On’.

However, for years now, we've been eagerly looking forward to the moment Ed Sheeran decides to go full Post Malone and drop a country album. The ‘Shivers’ crooner has spoken on a number of occasions about how much he loves the genre.

This weekend, Ed Sheeran surprised fans in Nashville with a performance at Tootsies Bar on Broadway, serenading the audience with an energising rendition of John Denver's ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, as well as originals such as ‘Thinking Out Loud’. Ed Sheeran uploaded a hilarious video of a fan at Tootsies looking less than impressed at his appearance, before fast-forwarding to a later moment in ‘Thinking Out Loud’, where the attendee was singing along. Sheeran quipped, “Back in Nashville for the day, not everyone was happy about it to begin with”.

Elsewhere during his brief stay in Nashville, Ed Sheeran made his debut at the iconic Bluebird Café with a writers’ round alongside Megan Moroney, Amy Allen and David Hodges.

Heartwarmingly, this also served as a milestone moment for Megan Moroney, with the Georgia prodigy making her Bluebird Café debut too. Via her Instagram Stories, Moroney endearingly thanked Ed Sheeran for asking her to play alongside him, “my first time playing the [Bluebird Café], thanks for inviting me [Ed Sheeran]”.

Ed Sheeran popped up at a few other spots in Nashville during his stint in Tennessee, with Sheeran delivering a talk on songwriting at the famous Belmont University. While performing across the US, Ed Sheeran has continued to tease his next era, with the global phenom debuting an unreleased song, ‘Azizam’, in New Orleans.

Sheeran confirmed it would be arriving soon, telling fans, “I’ve got a new song coming in a couple weeks that no one’s heard. This will be the first time it’s ever been played live”.

Fan theories currently suggest that Ed Sheeran will be calling his next project Play, with this potentially kicking off a new series of symbol-themed records, such as Pause, Fast-Forward and Rewind. It would follow in a similar vein to his previous Mathematics era, which featured lauded albums such as Minus, Divide, Plus and Multiply.

It certainly feels like his Tootsies and Bluebird performances are indications that Ed Sheeran might have one or two country-leaning tracks on his next record, but whether or not he's readying a full-length country album remains unclear at this point.

Even if we don't end up getting a full-length country project from the genre-blending maverick, we'd love to see Ed Sheeran joining forces with Megan Moroney for a collaboration.

With Ed Sheeran having collaborated with both Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs, as well as recruiting Sam Barber to open up for him during his 2023 Michigan tour-stop, there is no shortage of country artists that Sheeran could combine with, should he decide to test the waters with his fabled debut country album.

Of course, at the moment it remains to be seen whether Play will indeed find Sheeran exploring his country-leaning impulses - but either way, it thankfully looks like there's finally plenty of new music on the horizon from the British chart-topper, with his previous studio album, Autumn Variations, dropping back in September 2023.

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