Isaac Slade Opens Ed Sheeran's Atlanta Show, Urging Common Ground on Gaza

ATLANTA — For the past month, Ed Sheeran's Loop Tour has been the music industry's most uncomfortable open wound: a stadium run bleeding openers, playing defense, and making headlines for everything except the music. On Saturday night at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the bleeding finally stopped — and the bandage came in the most Sheeran way imaginable. The venue had teased a "special guest" in its "Know Before You Go" Instagram post, and when the lights dropped before the 8 p.m. headlining set, out walked Isaac Slade — the former Fray frontman, one of Sheeran's self-described musical heroes — to open the show with "How to Save a Life."

The roar told you everything. Slade, 45, performed an abbreviated set that leaned on The Fray's two immortal sing-alongs, How to Save a Life and You Found Me, and the stadium treated him like a headliner. It was the first time in weeks the Loop Tour's opening slot had been filled by anyone at all — and Slade, who left The Fray in 2022 to focus on his mental health and launched his first solo tour last December, looked like a man who understood the weight of the moment. He told the crowd he was honored to be there. Then, in the bravest move of the night, he addressed the elephant in the room.

"Two people I deeply respect have found themselves on opposite sides of the field," Slade said, according to fan-captured video of the speech, as reported by USA Today. "I respect and admire Macklemore for raising his voice for the innocent lives that are being lost right now as we speak. I respect Ed for making this place safe and welcoming for all of us, regardless of what we believe."

What followed was remarkable — not a dodge, not a platitude, but a genuinely thoughtful few minutes about the Gaza war from a pop stage. "Everybody seems to be taking sides … and that's good," Slade said. "What's happening over there is not right. But if we're going to get through this, we also need people who are brave enough to step out into the middle place, that common ground, that bonfire in the middle of the field that sees both sides, that understands that peace is not the lack of conflict."

"Peace is a messy painting," he said, per the fan footage. "[Peace] holds enough beauty, enough tragedy, enough sorrow, enough joy and life if we learn how to integrate it and hold each other in balance. We will find a way through this together."

It was a needle-threading act — praising Macklemore's pro-Palestinian advocacy and Sheeran's stewardship of the room in the same breath — and it landed. The crowd stayed with him. Say what you want about whether pop concerts should host this kind of speech at all; Slade is one of the few people who could have walked into that specific firestorm and come out the other side with both sides applauding. He's spent two decades writing songs about exactly this kind of emotional middle ground.

And the connection runs deep. Sheeran has described The Fray's music as formative to his songwriting — the earnest, piano-driven confessionals of the mid-2000s were part of the DNA of the kid from Suffolk who taught himself to write songs in his bedroom. Slade previously joined Sheeran onstage during a Loop Tour stop in Toronto in August, where they performed How to Save a Life together — a preview, in hindsight, of Saturday night. When the tour's opening slot emptied out, Sheeran didn't reach for a hot newcomer. He reached for family.

The reason the slot was empty is the story that has consumed this tour for a month. Macklemore was the Loop Tour's opening act until his performances at Sheeran's Sept. 4 and 5 shows at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, where he wore a black-and-white keffiyeh, repeatedly shouted "Free Palestine" to the crowd, and performed his pro-Palestinian anthem "Hind's Hall." Sheeran later said the decision to remove Macklemore from the remaining dates was made by the tour's promoter after venues signaled they would not let the shows proceed with Macklemore on the bill — with Gillette Stadium owner Robert Kraft the most prominent of those owners.

What happened next was a solidarity cascade. Openers Finneas, Aaron Rowe and Lukas Graham and backing band Beoga all quit the tour in support of Macklemore, leaving Sheeran to play Philadelphia on Sept. 19 with no opener at all. There, he addressed the controversy directly. He had been "making mistakes" in his handling of the fallout, he said, and was "so, so sorry" for how it had unfolded. The two scheduled shows at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough were then canceled altogether due to severe nor'easter weather, giving the tour an involuntary week off to regroup.

Which is what made Saturday night feel like a turning point rather than just a concert. Atlanta was the tour getting back on its feet — with a guest who didn't just fill the slot but gave the whole evening a spine. Slade's speech didn't litigate the Macklemore decision or relitigate the venue owners' stance. It just named the pain on both sides and asked 70,000 people to sit with it. In a month where everyone involved in this tour has been asked to pick a side, that was the boldest set anyone played all night.

The US leg of the Loop Tour wraps Nov. 7 at Tampa's Raymond James Stadium before heading to Latin America, ending Dec. 11 at Mexico City's Estadio Ciudad de los Deportes. Whether Slade makes another appearance before then is anyone's guess — but Saturday night suggests Sheeran has found, at minimum, a template for the rest of the run: bring in people the audience already loves, and let the music do the talking. For a tour that spent a month as a cautionary tale, that's a pretty good recovery plan. See more from the 2026 MTV VMAs and John Mayer's Sphere residency plans, plus Metallica's Sphere residency, for more live-music coverage.