The U2 singer said that Sheeran told him: “I just want to keep my thing free.”

Ed Sheeran told Bono he didn’t want to get into politics when collaborating on song about Ukraine war

The U2 singer said that Sheeran told him: “I just want to keep my thing free.”

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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October 1, 2026 2:42 p.m. ET

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Ed Sheeran in Los Angeles on Jan. 9, 2026; Bono in Berlin on Feb. 19, 2023. Credit:

Earl Gibson III/Deadline/Getty; Gisela Schober/Getty

- Ed Sheeran collaborated with U2 on “Yours Eternally,” a song inspired by Ukrainian singer Taras Topolia.

- Bono said that Sheeran asked him, “You’re not going to get me into politics, are you?”

- The U2 singer also said that Sheeran said, “I just want to keep my thing free.”

Ed Sheeran really doesn’t want to talk about politics.

After the “Shape of You” singer faced widespread backlash for Macklemore‘s removal from his Loop tour over the rapper’s pro-Palestine comments (and doubling down on his decision to not take a side in the Israel-Palestine conflict), the members of U2 discussed Sheeran’s attitude toward politics as they recorded “Yours Eternally,” a collaboration with Ukrainian singer and soldier Taras Topolia inspired by Ukraine’s war with Russia.

“I will say this: When we did ‘Yours Eternally,’ he was saying, ‘You’re not going to get me into politics, are you?’” Bono told *Rolling Stone UK*. “I said, ‘This soldier who has inspired us, he loved you, Ed, and you’ve worked on this song.’”

Bono claimed that Sheeran responded, “Yeah, but I just want to keep my thing free.” The “With or Without You” singer added, “You can’t be pushing people around.”

Representatives for Sheeran did not immediately respond to **‘s request for comment.

Ed Sheeran in Newark, N.J., on Sept. 26, 2025.

Kevin Mazur/Getty

Sheeran previously collaborated with Topolia’s band, Antytila, on a remix of his song “2step” in 2022. He also participated in the Concert for Ukraine in Birmingham, England, that same year.

Later in the interview, U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. paraphrased the words of producer Brian Eno to explain why he thinks musicians aren’t obligated to publicly comment on political matters.

“[Eno] was just saying that artists choose whether they want to be involved, and they are entitled to choose whether they want to be involved or not. And it’s not our job to criticize that, no matter how we feel,” he said. “Brian Eno was saying that it takes time for these things to evolve and people to come to realizations and, not to personalize this, and Bob Geldof was saying a similar thing. I really appreciated hearing that because it is confusing and it is complicated.”

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However, Mullen also noted that U2 has a long history of outspoken political stances, including their early track “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which revolved around the Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland in 1972.

“We are absolutely clear about promoters or billionaire owners and the idea that they could have some influence on what you say or what you do on a stage,” he said. “We’ve talked about this: if you applied that logic to U2, we would have been out of business on ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday.’”

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Bono interjected with another moment of political consequence in the band’s early history.  “Even before you got to our performance of ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ in Arizona when we were campaigning for Martin Luther King Day and there was a governor at that time, [Evan] Mecham, who was resisting,” he recalled. “And we were told we weren’t welcome there. We’ve been getting into this trouble. It’s what we do and we’re happy to do that, but we’re also happy to recognize if other people don’t want to get into that kind of fight.”

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Source: “EW Musicians”