Ed Sheeran And Blake Slatkin On Making ‘F1’ Song “Drive”

When Apple Original Films reached out to Ed Sheeran to commission a song from him for F1 starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Javier Bardem, Kerry Condon and more, they let him select the scene to set it to and the type of song he would write.

The “Sapphire” singer and four-time Grammy winner, who gets three to four calls a year to write a song for a film, selected the final, closing scene of the film for “Drive,” which he put together with producer and songwriter Blake Slatkin and is now shortlisted for the Outstanding Original Song Oscar.

Sheeran — also behind the “All of These Stars” from the film The Fault In Our Stars“I See Fire” from The Hobbit and “Under the Tree” from That Christmas — and Slatkin, who collaborated on Sheeran’s latest album Playunpacked the making of the gritty anthem in a panel discussion for Deadline’s Anatomy of a Song spotlight series.

The conversation, introduced by David Taylor, Head of Music, Apple Original Films & TV, was moderated by Ryan Tedder, One Republic’s lead singer (and co-writer of “Just Keep Watching” and “Lose My Mind” from F1), at The Motoring Club in Los Angeles.

Watch the conversation here, and check out photos from the event below.

“I don’t think that ‘Drive’ is a song that could go side by side with a song on my album because it’s such a stylistically different song, but it works so well in the movie, in the way that we did it before the movie,” Sheeran said. “I think that if you’re making a song for a movie, you kind of have to not have the lens of pop on it, and more the lens of how is it going to work in the movie, rather than how is it going to work outside the movie? Because you might as well make a song that just works outside a movie, and not make the song for the movie, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

What drew Sheeran in this song’s case is that he could branch out from his expertise in ballads and love songs. His interest in Formula 1 as a sport and the build-up around the film itself also made him say yes. There was talk of the song being in the film’s opening scene, and it all started with the desire for a big rock riff to match the movie’s adrenaline.

“I normally work in pop music, and pop music is very on the grid, time-wise, and very polished. And because of where it was in the in the movie the end title, because it was supposed to represent Sonny (Pitt) and his whole journey, I wanted to keep it as raw as possible,” Slatkin said. “And I wanted you to feel the band in the room. I wanted to not time anything and just be like, let’s just get the best f*cking players in the entire world to play on this.”

Enter The Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl on drums, which Slatkin painstakingly took a day to edit after Apple and the film’s director Joseph Kosinski gave a note that they weren’t loud enough, and John Mayer on guitar. Mayer worked at his newly purchased Chaplin Studios (formerly Jim Henson Studio), which he now co-owns with director McG.

“The first thing that John played on his guitar was the riff that you hear in the song,” Slatkin said, with Sheeran adding that Mayer has “a toolbox of all of these riffs that he’s never used before.”

RELATED: ‘F1: The Movie’ Review: Brad Pitt Puts The Pedal To The Metal In Joseph Kosinski’s Old-School Racing Drama

Mayer also came up with the idea to create screeching guitar notes, heard faintly underneath all the other layers of the music, to emulate car tires against asphalt. The opening raw vocals from Sheeran in “Drive” are also the first take he did for the song, which he wrote on the way to Butlin’s across the pond for a mate’s bachelor party.