Eminem has not just changed Sheeran’s approach to the work-life balance. He guides the younger British star who started building his own music cassette collection.
For Sheeran, that was an effort to fill the house with music for his daughter. However, when he built his stereo system with a cassette deck, Ed realised that cassettes are not that easy to find. And he knew only one person who was passionate and knowledgeable about this music medium — Eminem.
On the BBC’s “Later… with Jools Holland”, Ed Sheeran explained how his interest brought two artists together and made them exchange favourite albums, share influences and became, essentially, pen pals:
I worked with Eminem back in 2017, and then we did two more songs in 2019 together. And he collects cassettes, that’s his thing, he loves collecting cassettes. And he is avid of going to find them. So I emailed his assistant and got a message back from him being like, “I find them on this website”, and we’ve started having this… It’s kind of a very cool pen-pal thing. I literally, the day before I came here, I got a message in the post with an LL Cool J “Bad” cassette. Just being like, “And this is the cassette that made me want to start rapping”. I sent him Van Morrison and The Chieftains. I’m going to send him David Gray’s “White Ladder”, I think, next.
