Ed Sheeran may be the star of a new Beats by Dre commercial, revealed Thursday, but the brand new track he sings in the ad allegedly centers on former flame who cheated with a close friend.
“Don’t,” featured in the ad ahead of Sheeran’s upcoming album x, is the groove-based R&B track co-produced by the unlikely team of Rick Rubin and Benny Blanco, initially set to be the first single. He first recorded the track with both producers separately. “I loved elements of both,” Sheeran told Billboard, “and I knew that together they could make something really super-powered, between Benny’s pop sensibility and Rick’s raw, earthy, gravelly coolness. So Benny went to L.A. and sat with Rick.”
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Sheeran is shown wearing Solo 2 headphones (available for pre-order, $199.95) while constructing the salacious song in a hotel room. “The story in ‘Don’t’ is 100 percent true. I could have gotten nastier — there was more shit that I didn’t put in,” he continued to Billboard of the track, which narrates a tale of cheating. “I was seeing someone for a bit of time, and then they ended up physically involved with one of my friends in the same hotel that we were staying in, while I was downstairs. And I feel like: Treat people how you want to be treated.”
The new track features raw lyrics like, “I never saw him as a threat/Till you disappeared with him to have sex,” “If I show courtesy and respect to someone, I expect to receive it,” and “When we’re in the same hotel, and I’m downstairs at my party and you’re upstairs doing that, that’s disrespectful.” But Sheeran said that comes with the territory of getting involved with a musician. “If you date a songwriter, be prepared to have songs written about you. If you do nice things, you’ll have nice songs. And if you do f—ed-up things, you’ll get a horrible song.”
Watch the ad below:
So who is the song about? Reports point to a tryst between Ellie Goulding and One Direction’s Niall Horan, but for now, it’s the track plugging a new lightweight and durable pair of headphones.
- This article originally appeared in THR.com.