Ed Sheeran and Eminem are familiar collaborators, as they’ve worked together on songs like River, Those Kinda Nights, and Remember The Name. Their relationship extends beyond their work together, though. The first time they met in the studio, they talked more about video games and movies than they did music. It turns out the two have a sort of pen pal relationship now, too, thanks to their mutual love of collecting cassette tapes.
On a recent episode of Later… With Jools Holland, Sheeran noted, "I collect cassettes and I’ve got Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, and they are quite difficult to find. The only person I know who collects the same is Eminem. He collects cassettes — that’s his thing. He loves collecting. He is avid at going to find them.
"We have started having this… it’s like a very cool pen pal thing. I got a message the other day about an LL Cool J cassette. He said, ‘This is the cassette which made me want to start rapping.’ I sent him Van Morrison and I will send him David Gray’s White Ladder next.”
Eminem also told Zane Lowe late last year, "I just started [collecting] again. It took me about three years to get what I got right now because some tapes are harder to find than others. When I was a kid, I didn’t have money to buy every tape I ever wanted. So usually, what we had to do was go to this place called Record Time and I would take the tape that came out a couple weeks ago and trade it in for the new tape. You know, whatever else was out.”
Ed's about to drop his new album = (pronounced 'Equals'), the last chapter of his Mathematics series of albums, and while it doesn't seem to feature any legends like Em, we hope we see another collab soon!
