Top News:Ed Sheeran shuns social media “until it’s time to come back”

Ed Sheeran is dropping his New Year’s resolutions early. Tuesday, he announced that he’s planning to take a break from social media — and work — to “take a breather to travel, write and read. I’ll be off all social media until it’s time to come back,” he wrote on Instagram.

“The Divide era and tour changed my life in so many ways, but now it’s all over it’s time to go out and see more of the world,” he wrote. “I promise to be back with some new music when the time is right and I’ve lived a little more to actually have something to write about.”

Sheeran has been going hard since releasing Divide in 2017, which boasted a Number One hit, “Shape of You”. The album’s 2018 tour also earned more than any global jaunt in the past 30 years, as of that year. At the time, the tour sold 4,860,482 tickets across 53 cities and 94 shows for an all-time record gross of $432 million.

Sheeran took a similar break after winning the Grammy for Song of the Year in 2016 for “Thinking Out Loud”, off 2014’s mMultiply. In a previous interview with Rolling Stone, Sheeran detailed how he skipped the various afterparties and hopped a plane to Iceland, then rural Japan, to “eat weird food, soak in the hot springs and ski”, he said. At the time, Elton John — who signed the singer to his management company in 2011 — told Rolling Stone that Sheeran’s travels “refreshed his soul.”

In July, Sheeran released No. 6 Collaborations Project, the follow-up to 2011’s No.5 Collaborations Project, an EP that showcased a series of collabs with U.K. grime artists. No. 6 boasted a pretty impressive array of talent: Travis Scott, Justin Bieber, Cardi B, Eminem, 50 Cent, Chance the Rapper, Camila Cabello, Young Thug, Skrillex, Chris Stapleton, Bruno Mars, Stormzy, and others.