It’s good to be the Queen. Ed Sheeran revealed in a new interview that his “Perfect” duet partner, Beyoncé, is a hard woman to get hold of.
“I have an email address that I email that actually changes every week,” the British singer, 26, told Entertainment Tonight of how the collaboration happened.
“It’s kind of like what I aspire to be I think,” he said on the Grammy winner’s elusiveness in a story posted on Saturday, December 2. “So I emailed that and we got on the phone.”
The “Shape of You” singer revealed that the collaboration had “been in the works since May.”
“Obviously she had twins [in June], and we finished it in September, so I’ve been holding onto it since then,” he said of the track, which was released on Thursday, November 30.
Sheeran said that the original version of the song was just an acoustic guitar, but after he changed it to a more orchestral sound, Queen Bey had other ideas.
“She rung me up and was like, ‘I don’t know how you feel about this but I’ve taken all the instruments off it and it’s just gonna be acoustic guitar,’ and I was like, ‘Ah, that’s great, because it used to be that!'” Sheeran told ET.
He found it easy to collaborate with Beyoncé, 36, on the new mix of the song that was originally featured on Sheeran’s latest album, ÷ (Divide).
“When we got in together, it wasn’t so much notes, it was very much like a back and forth thing, like, ‘What’d you think of this?’ Or ‘What do you think of this?’ and we were probably in the studio for four hours,” he revealed.
Asked what he learned from working with the former Destiny’s Child singer, Sheeran said, “one-take vocals.”
“She was just like, ‘Right!’ Went in, one take, came out, like, ‘Yeah, that sounds all right!'” he said.
As previously reported, Sheeran, who has performed with Beyoncé twice before, also spoke about working with the powerhouse vocalist during an interview with Ellen DeGeneres on Friday, December 1.
“The [original] song came out so long ago in the scheme of music … and I was like, I want to do it as a single, and then I thought of a way of relaunching it,” he said. “I was like, ‘I love Beyoncé. Should I ask Beyoncé?’ And then in my head, I was like, ‘She’s going to say no,’ but then I was like, ‘Well, you might as well ask.’ And she said yeah, so here we are.”
