Ed Sheeran co-wrote this Purpose track. "We wrote a song together and basically it's one of my favorites on the album," Bieber revealed to UK radio station, Capital FM. "It's just me and a guitar and basically that's how I started. I started playing on the street with a guitar and so it's cool to go back to my roots."
Asked by Capital FM's Roman Kemp if the song is about his own past experiences with a girlfriend, Bieber replied: "Yeah, it is but you know I don't want to make anyone upset so I'm not going to say it to the public."
The song replaced Bieber's own "
Sorry" at #1 on the UK singles chart, matching a record previously held by just The Beatles and Elvis Presley. The Beatles were the last living act to achieve the feat in December 1963, when "
I Want To Hold Your Hand" replaced "
She Loves You" at the top. In 2005 reissues of Elvis' singles "
Jailhouse Rock" and "
One Night/I Got Stung" went to the summit of the charts in successive weeks.
The music video features husband-and-wife dancers Keone and Mari Madrid dancing their way through their house. 23-year-old Parris Goebel, the founder of the New Zealand ReQuest dance crew, directed the clip. She also choreographed Justin Bieber's "
Sorry" visual.
"Love Yourself" also replaced "Sorry" at #1 on the US chart dated February 13, 2016. It was the third consecutive US #1 hit from
Purpose ("
What Do You Mean?" was the first), making it the first album by a male artist to generate three consecutive chart-toppers since Justin Timberlake's
FutureSex / LoveSounds almost 10 years previously.
The song represented Ed Sheeran's first trip as a songwriter to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. He'd previously reached #2 with his own "
Thinking Out Loud."
At the Grammy Awards ceremony in 2016, Bieber performed this song alone with an acoustic guitar before joining Skrillex and Diplo for a high-energy rendition of "
Where Are U Now."
This won for Favorite Pop/Rock Song at the 2016 American Music Awards. Bieber was the big winner of the evening, with four awards: he also won for Favorite Male Artist, Video of the Year ("Sorry") and Favorite Album (Purpose).
Ed Sheeran originally wrote this for his ÷ album, but gave it to Justin Bieber as he'd decided not to record the tune.
"That was a song I had written for ÷. It just wouldn't have made it," he told Carson Daly on 97.1 AMP Radio. "And then Justin took it and did his thing on it, and released it as a single and made it what it is."
He continued: "So going from a song that would have never been released to [being] the biggest song of last year - it just became Billboard's #1 of 2016 of the whole year, and [was] nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys - it just shows you that you shouldn't always write stuff off."
Sheeran refused to take all the credit for the song, telling Carson Daly, "He (Justin) did have input on it. I wouldn't say it was just all me."
Ed Sheeran told UK newspaper
The Sun he has no regrets about not recording the song himself: "A lot of people say, 'Do you wish you finished that and kept it for yourself?' But in my year off I had that song and
Cold Water, and both kept me in the public eye without me being in the public eye. So it came as a blessing. I don't think Justin owes me. I think that song did quite well. I think I'm alright."
Ed Sheeran and Benny Blanco wrote this after attending Drake and Future's album release party in Canada. On board the tour bus taking them back to the United States, the two decided to stay up all night waiting to get to the border. Blanco and Sheeran wrote a song in order to kill time. Blanco explained to Karson and Annie from Boston's Mix 104.1: "We go to the back and we start writing the beginnings of a song, and we actually finished it the next day, and… that song was 'Love Yourself."
Out of the many songs Ed Sheeran has co-written for other artists, he considers this his favorite. "I feel like the one that is the slam dunk, whenever I'm at a gig, to play someone else's song that I had written is "Love Yourself" by Justin Bieber because it was so massive for him," Sheeran told Jack Antonoff in a December 2021 Audacy video chat. "I think it's his biggest song... anywhere in the world, if I picked up a guitar and played that, they'd be like 'oh my god, you wrote that!'"
"People always say, 'Why didn't you keep it?' And to be honest, he was on such a roll at that point that I think it wouldn't have been as big if I'd sung it," he continued. "He had his whole period of his life that was a bit... you know what I mean. And America loves a comeback story."
