Ed Sheeran recently announced that his new album is called Play, and now we have a taste of it with the single “Azizam.”
Sheeran says of the track:
“Even though it’s completely different to anything that I’ve ever done before, Azizam feels familiar to me. I wanted to create a party atmosphere in a song and Ilya Salmanzadeh, who I worked with on the track, helped bring that to life. He was so inspiring to work with.”
A press release notes the song’s origins lie in a meeting with Salmanzadeh (a Swedish/Iranian producer), where they found an overlap between Persian and Irish folk music and decided to put them in a pop context.
This comes shortly after Sheeran’s appearance on The Tonight Show last week, where he spoke about the song. He noted the title is Farsi for “my dear,” and that he’s recorded a version of the song that’s sung entirely in Farsi. He added, “I feel like the Persian community has really embraced the song and what we’ve been doing with it, and I feel very honored to be kind of taken by the hand and shown different things.”
For more on how the track came to be, Sheeran also shared a behind-the-scenes video of the making of “Azizam” a couple days ago:
Watch the “Azizam” video above.
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