Ed Sheeran's third single from his debut album + finds him using a Lego house as a metaphor for a relationship. "I'm gonna pick up the pieces and build a Lego house, if things go wrong, we can knock it down," he sings.
Sheeran penned the song with producer/songwriter Jake Gosling, who has also worked with drum and bass artist Wiley, including his hit single "
Cash In My Pocket." The other credited songwriter is former Son of Dork guitarist Chris Leonard. His resume includes co-penning "Loving You" from Paolo Nutini's debut album
These Streets.
Sheeran also used the plastic toy building brick as a simile on another
+ track, "
U.N.I." - "I never wanna settle down come around break up the love like Lego now."
Guess how Sheeran celebrated when he got the news that he'd scored his first #1 with +? He went to Hamley's toyshop and bought a Lego Star Wars Millennium Falcon. Then together with his pal, One Direction's Harry Styles, they spent the night building spaceships with the colored bricks.
Lego originated in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from the small town of Billund, Denmark. In 1932 he started making wooden toys to make a living after having lost his job during the depression and he named his new company Lego from the Danish words LEg GOdt ("play well"). Later, it was discovered that in Latin, the term "Lego" means "I put together" or "I assemble."
Christiansen began making simple plastic toys as well as wooden ones after the Second World War and in 1949 began manufacturing the now famous interlocking Lego bricks. Ole Christiansen was strongly anti-war, reflecting his Christian upbringing and the effects of the war. Not wanting to encourage warlike construction with his new toy, he made sure that brown and green bricks, which could be used to represent camouflaged military vehicles, were virtually absent from basic Lego sets.
Here's some more songs that refer to Lego in their lyrics:
1) "
Xoxoxo" by The Black Eyed Peas - "I wanna stay connected like Lego You're the gas to my car, you're my petrol."
2) "
Up Out My Face" by Mariah Carey - "If we were two Lego blocks. Even the Harvard University Graduating class of 2010 . Couldn't put us. Back together again."
3) "
All Night Cinema" by Just Jack - "Sometimes they're made of Lego Sometimes they're made of gold. And sometimes it's hard to let go."
The song's music video was filmed at the Forum, University of Hertfordshire and features Harry Potter actor Rupert Grint as an obsessive fan. Sheeran told MTV UK that it was Grint's Harry Potter colleague Tom Felton who was responsible for his starring role in the clip. "Tom is a fan of my music and started tweeting me, so I just took a chance and he hooked it all up," he explained. "It's all down to him."
This is the song that got the attention of Taylor Swift, who reached out to Sheeran after she heard it. Sheeran and Swift ended up collaborating on her song "
Everything Has Changed," and they quickly became good friends and tourmates. Swift admitted her envy of this song during the MTV documentary series
Nine Days and Nights. "I've never been more jealous of anything in my life," she said. "I love the way he incorporates rhythm pattern into lyrics … no one else is writing pre-choruses like that, or verses like that."
Jake Gosling's writing process typically involves him asking at the outset of each session what is going on in the singer's life and seeing if any lyrical themes emerge. That method produced "Lego House." He told Q magazine: "The concept was about how simple love can be, in terms of you can build it up as much as you can easily knock it down. It was trying to look at love, I guess, from a childish point of view."
Sheeran wrote this with JLS in mind, but the boy band's label blocked them from recording it because they thought it was "too cheesy."
