Ed Sheeran once succumbed to the most understandable peer pressure scenario of all time: Getting dangerously high with Snoop Dogg.
On a new episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Sheeran said he was recently in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and mother-in-law and convinced them both they had to attend a Snoop show. To set the scene, the singer-songwriter recalled Snoop graciously greeting his mother-in-law with a “What’s up, queen?” He also noted that the connection was brokered by a mutual friend in attendance: Russel Crowe. (According to Sheeran, Snoop and Crowe are “really close” and “have smoke-offs and stuff” — we’ll need a follow-up on that.)
Before continuing, Sheeran noted he doesn’t smoke weed very often, but while everyone was hanging out in the dressing room, he started thinking to himself, “I guess at some point during the night, I’ll have to, just to be like, I smoked with Snoop Dogg!” Eventually, the inevitable offer of a toke came, and Sheeran took it.
“We’d had a good amount of conversation, so I have a bit, and I’m like, ‘I don’t feel too bad, this is good,’” Sheeran recalled. “So I have a bit more, I have a bit more, I have a bit more.” As the audience groaned in recognition of such a pitfall, Sheeran chuckled and said, “Oh my god, I just remember looking at him and being like, ‘I can’t see right now!’”
O’Brien then shared his own Snoop story when the rapper appeared as a guest on Late Night back in the Nineties. O’Brien said Snoop and his entourage hot-boxed the hell out of their dressing room, which happened to be right next to the actual studio, and the smoke started filtering out to where the crowd was. When O’Brien went out to do his monolog, he became convinced the audience had caught a contact high because they were cracking up before he even hit the punchlines of his jokes.
“You could smell it, and we were like, ‘This is wrong on so many levels — it was bring your infant day,’” O’Brien cracked. “But what are you gonna do? Everyone understands: that’s Snoop Dogg.”
Sheeran just released his seventh album, Autumn Variations, last Friday. The album marked his second offering of the year, following – (a.k.a. “Subtract”), which was released back in May. Sheeran made both albums with the National’s Aaron Dessner.