Ed Sheeran, who is known for ballads and folk music, stepped out of his usual genre for Joseph Kosinski’s F1.
The film, based on Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes, who is forced out of retirement to help his friend’s team APEX GP in winning the race, needed an adrenaline fueled and high octane song to match the energy of the film.
According to Variety, his producing partner Blake Slatkin first got to see about 20 minutes of the film and immediately brought it up to the Photograph hitmaker.
Sheeran watched the footage with Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of the film, who requested the Sapphire singer to write a song for a specific scene that would be the film’s final sequence.
“I sent a voice note to Blake which was essentially the chorus mumbled,” Sheeran says. At the end he mumbled the word “drive” because “I wanted it to sound like an engine starting.”
“We wanted it to make it feel in the zone of very riffed-based ‘70s rock music,” he added.
Slatkin said, “People don’t realize that Ed can rock like this. We had so many times when we were making music…but it never really fit the record.”
Drive gave Sheeran a chance to show the other side of his vocals.
While writing the song for the dune buggy scene, the goal was to build everything toward the film’s big, dramatic moment.
The Azizam singer knew the song had to feel intense and powerful, saying, “It needs to have this riff to start off with. The drums need to come in at this point. The chorus needs to come at this point.”
As of now, while Sheeran is on tour, Drive is not part of his set list. He shared that while writing the song came easily for him, “It was a f—g ball ache to sing.”
