British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, whom I’d seen open for Taylor Swift’s Red tour a couple years back is now on a tour of his own.

Ed Sheeran became popular in American around 2012. His hit singles “The A Team” and “Lego House” were released in England just a year before. According to www.billboard.com, he won two Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act.

He spent most of 2013 on tour with Taylor Swift and 2014 was a year for himself. He released his second album titled x which topped the charts in both the UK and the US. He was also nominated for the Best New Artist award at the Grammy Awards.

With all this talk about Ed Sheeran, I couldn’t pass up tickets to see if he was really worth the hype.

I went into the concert not knowing any songs off of his album besides “The A Team” and “Lego House”. With this in mind, I didn’t expect the concert to be one for the books.

The club box seats didn’t hurt the experience, however. The $14.00 crab fries at the Wells Fargo Center hurt my wallet a little though.

The opening act came out and they were someone I have never heard of. Their name was Rudimental and to no surprise, they were a band from the UK trying to get their feet wet in America. It’s not that the opening act was bad, it’s that I couldn’t understand the words of their songs due to their accents. To say the least, the most entertaining part of the opening act were the crab fries.

The opening act left the stage around 8:15. Ed Sheeran didn’t come on until 9:00. I’ve been to many concerts and I’ve never experienced a 45 minute break like that. There was no background music just the sound of people going to and from their seats and the concession stands.

Finally, Ed came on. His introduction was his hit song “Lego House”. Then there was a lineup of songs that I was not familiar with.

The songs differed from “Don’t” where Ed Sheeran showed off his freestyle rapping skills to one of his slower songs “Give Me Love.” The songs were on two different spectrums of genres but Sheeran did a fantastic job of performing the rap songs, the slow songs and everything in between with songs like “Bloodstream”, “The Man”, “Wake Me Up”, “One”, “Sing”, and “I See Fire.” Despite my lack of knowledge of the songs, the crowd was singing along to each song, making sure to never miss a beat.

After the first several songs, I thought Sheeran would introduce himself (not that he really needed an introduction), and talk to the fans for a moment. The artists at all the other concerts I’ve been to have done this.

Not Sheeran. He just kept singing and the crowd wasn’t complaining.

There were actually a group of girls a few years younger than me sitting infront of me crying as he played. I didn’t realize how big of a fan base Sheeran had and how much he impacted his fans with his music.

As the time slowed approached 10:30, Sheeran still hadn’t played his top hit “The A Team”. I couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t play his most famous song.

There was also a Phillies game going on that evening, so I wanted to beat the traffic out of the city. I kept telling myself that I didn’t want to leave before the concert was over because I would miss one of the two songs I knew. But time kept passing and he kept playing different songs.

Eventually, I just left. Fortunately, I beat the Phillies traffic or I would have been angrily sitting in traffic regretting my decision to stay at the concert.

I can’t say that I complete regret my decision of going to the concert; it’s not like I would have been doing anything else of that Monday night. I was disappointed since he didn’t play his hit songs. I may have been the only one who was disappointed, however. Girls all across the stadium were crying and pop artists like Sheeran usually enjoy reactions like this.