Ed Sheeran Salutes Taylor Swift for Introducing Him to Mutual Collaborator Aaron Dessner: 'You Rock'

Anna Webber/Getty Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift

Ed Sheeran is giving credit where credit is due.

On Thursday, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, 32, thanked his longtime collaborator Taylor Swift on Instagram for her help with his next album.

While there's no signs pointing to Swift, 33, being featured on - (pronounced Subtract), she did connect Sheeran with their now-mutual collaborator Aaron Dessner, who notably worked with her on albums folklore and evermore.

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"So in 2021, I got a message from @taylorswift to link me up with @aarondessner. She thought he and I would make something great together," Sheeran revealed in an Instagram caption. "I have to be honest I was a bit reticent to work with him that soon after folklore and evermore because I felt that was Taylors thing and they had both been done so perfectly. But we met for dinner, chatted about life and music, and he promised to send me some instrumentals for me to write over whenever inspiration hit."

The National's Dessner, 46, earned an album of the year Grammy win with Swift for their work on folklore in 2021, and he's since formed a creative bond with Sheeran, too. As the musician writes, Dessner provided him with some instrumentals that he "loved the whole overall vibe of," but didn't feel they matched up with what his new album was set to be, at least at the time.

"Then, as I said in my announcement post, a lot of things started happening in my personal life that I just felt the need to vent about on song and write diaristically about them," Sheeran wrote. "I had Aarons' instrumentals, so just started writing, and writing, and writing. He flew over to the UK and we recorded it in a week by the seaside, and it's just been the most incredible process, and an album I'm so bloody proud of."

"Thanks to Aaron and Jon for the insane amount of hard work and dedication you put into this project, and bringing out a side of me I had put on mute for so long," he continued. "And of course, thanks to Swizzle, as always, you rock x"

RELATED: Ed Sheeran Announces 'Honest' New Album, Reveals Wife Cherry Seaborn Had a Tumor During Pregnancy

Christopher Polk/Getty Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift

Sheeran and Swift go way back, meeting in 2012 and eventually collaborating on Red's "Everything Has Changed." In 2017, the pair linked up on Swift's "End Game" alongside Future, and Ed even costarred in the music video at the time.

After re-recording their duet for Red (Taylor's Version) and sharing the previously unreleased song "Run" on the album, Sheeran released "The Joker and the Queen" alongside Swift in 2022. Sheeran even enlisted the same child actors who starred in their 2013 "Everything Has Changed" music video, making the collaboration a full circle moment.

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But now, the two are sharing mutual collaborators these days, as Sheeran preps his latest release.

"I had been working on Subtract for a decade, trying to sculpt the perfect acoustic album, writing and recording hundreds of songs with a clear vision of what I thought it should be. Then at the start of 2022, a series of events changed my life, my mental health, and ultimately the way I viewed music and art," Sheeran said in an Instagram announcement this week.

"Writing songs is my therapy. It helps me make sense of my feelings. I wrote without thought of what the songs would be, I just wrote whatever tumbled out. And in just over a week, I replaced a decade's worth of work with my deepest darkest thoughts.

"Within the space of a month, my pregnant wife got told she had a tumour, with no route to treatment until after the birth," he continued of wife Cherry Seaborn, whom he welcomed a second daughter with in May of last year.

The album, set to release on May 5, is "opening the trapdoor into my soul," he revealed.

"For the first time I'm not trying to craft an album people will like, I'm merely putting something out that's honest and true to where I am in my adult life," he said. "This is last February's diary entry and my way of making sense of it. This is Subtract."