Ellie Goulding says her 5-year break between albums was thanks in part to Ed Sheeran-Niall Horan rumors

Add Ellie Goulding’s latest musings to the long list of reasons why fame is not for the faint of heart. In a new interview, the singer shares that the voracity of 2014-era rumors that she had dated and subsequently been unfaithful to singer Ed Sheeran damaged her career and pushed her to take a five-year break from music. Renewed interest in the nearly decade-old rumor arose after Goulding reportedly responded to a fan’s TikTok comment asking if the gossip was true with: “False!!!!’ How come?”

Although Goulding has long declined to publicly comment on the matter, she addressed that hyper-scrutinized time in her career in a new conversation with the Daily Mail. The 2014 release of Sheeran’s song “Don’t” initially led to bubbling gossip around Goulding. Lines like “I never saw him as a threat/’Til you disappeared with him to have sex,” drew a swarm of internet sleuths who believed the track was about Goulding cheating on Sheeran with One Direction member Niall Horan. (Goulding denies sharing romantic relationships with either of the men.)

“You know, completely honestly, it caused me a huge amount of… stress is not the word. It caused me a lot of trauma, actually,” Goulding says of the rumors. “How old were we, 23? I envy the fact that my friends just spent their 20s having flings and one-night stands and what every 20-something goes through in private. But every single thing I did was written about. I was made to feel like a terrible person and I really struggled with that because I know I’m not.”

Although Goulding says she “can laugh about it now,” the artist emphasizes that the intense scrutiny the rumors begot “changed things for me.” As Goulding tells it, the situation led her to take a five-year hiatus from music between her third album Delirium and her 2020 record Brightest Blue.

“I became kind of reclusive. I didn’t want to perform,” Goulding says. “That’s why I wrote that comment because every day I get comments about this stupid teenage situation. It was nothing and it was private — and it caused me such a huge amount of grief and I resent it.”

Despite the painful place it led her to, Goulding says she respects his right to draw musical inspiration from whatever strikes him. “It is in the past and we’re friends,” she shares. “We’re adults.”