Quiet Student Enters School Talent Show And Impresses Crowd With Ed Sheeran Cover

Jan 12, 2021 by apost team

Back in 2018, Peyton Littleton sang Ed Sheeran's Perfect for his high school's talent show and won the whole thing.

Nothing at this high school could have ever prepared them for Peyton Littleton's secret talent. Being shy and quiet, nobody had ever thought twice of him or even expected that he could perform something so brilliantly.

In 2018, Littleton rose to the center stage and wowed everyone with his shocking, hidden talent at the Central Davidson High School Talent Show. While this was expected to be the typical high school show, Peyton's performance was not.

As he gets ready to perform and is setting his equipment up, the audience is chatting amongst themselves, not really interested in the upcoming performance. Of course, Littleton seems like any other high school student getting ready to showcase his common talent.

He is now ready to perform, but before he goes on, he waits to make sure that all eyes are on him, the mark of a true professional. This little pause confuses the audience and they suddenly realize that Littleton has an amazing treat in store for them. He tells the audience to not be afraid to sing along, as the song he will perform is most likely a tune everyone will know.

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Peyton Littleton begins singing Ed Sheeran's Perfect, a beautiful melody that makes everyone focus their attention on him.

He plays the guitar to complement his singing, and while this may seem fairly common, coordinating the two can often be difficult. It takes true talent to be able to accurately coordinate your voice and hands. Littleton's delightful music does the talking for him and everyone in the audience is quite frankly, pleasantly shocked.

The students begin shining their flashlights from their cellphones and waving their arms in tune with the music. They gave Littleton a superstar position, one that he more than deserved with his incredible talent. After the talent show, Peyton Littleton was given the title of first place. While the video does not show the other performances, it is easy to see how he won.

After Peyton finished performing, the audience erupted in applause and even gave a standing ovation. For someone so shy, we can only imagine how courageous Peyton Littleton must have been to perform in front of his classmates, much less the entire school. However, his decision to showcase his talent was the right choice because now he is taking part in plenty of other musical activities in his school.

Perfect by Ed Sheeran was released in 2017 and quickly became the top song in 16 countries, according to Songfacts. It was given three nominations at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards and due to its popularity, Sheeran did duets of the song with popular singers, Beyoncé and Andrea Bocelli.

Ed Sheeran's success with the song was due to its pure serenity. Perfect is a song that makes you remember falling in love all over again and makes you desire to gaze into your lover's eyes for hours and hours. Peyton executed this feeling perfectly. His performance can be seen online on his YouTube channel.

Interestingly, Ed Sheeran, who is an internationally renowned musician who's sold more than 150 million records worldwide, which makes him one of the best-selling musical artists around the world, also got his start on YouTube. Born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England on February 17, 1991, Sheeran's parents both worked in the art world, which perhaps helped to inspire some of his creativity early on. In fact, his older brother Matthew is also musically inclined, working as a composer. 

Sheeran's interest in music started from a young age, as he began to sing at a local church choir at four years old. By 11 he was learning how to play the guitar and soon after started writing songs while he was in high school. His talents were evident as he was described in a school report as a "natural performer," while his classmates declared that he was the "most likely to be famous." As a teen, Sheeran was accepted into the National Youth Theatre in London and performed in productions with the Youth Music Theatre UK.

His rise to professional fame began with Sheeran recording music in 2004, at the tender age of 23. The next years included playing many gigs to develop his sound and understanding of the professional music world, as well as putting himself on YouTube. This eventually culminated in the release of his first album + in 2011, which sold incredibly well in the UK and began to put Sheeran on the map. By this point, his work spoke for itself and led Sheeran to begin co-writing songs for other artists including One Direction and Taylor Swift.

His next full-length album x came out in 2014 and only added to his success, propelling Sheeran to international stardom. By the end of that year, Spotify named x the most-streamed album of the year globally. For someone who went from entering the professional music world in 2004 and ended up becoming the most streamed artist in the world ten years later, that is an incredible feat. What's so impressive about Sheeran is that he has kept on giving back to his fans and the public, no matter how successful he became. He's even offered up advice to budding musicians, particularly street buskers. In a 2015 interview with YP he said:

"You can't make it as just a voice; you have to be an artist. It doesn't matter if they're [terrible]. Just get them out there. The more you write songs, the more you improve over the years, so you might as well start now."

In the same interview, he gave tips on how to teach yourself to sing as well. Stating he taught himself to sing by doing slowed-down parts of Craig David and Beyonce songs, he explained:

"You can literally teach yourself to sing crazy runs just by singing them slowly and then faster. I don't know what it does to your vocal cords, but I think it stretches them in a way where you can do more [stuff]."

During his success at this time he also won Grammy Awards and various other accolades, but what's incredible is that Sheeran's strive to better himself and his career didn't stop there, he had bigger sights for himself. First off he took a one-year hiatus from performing and using social media. It's not often that people who are at the pinnacle of their success take time off, but it's also an integral step in ensuring their longevity. He addressed his break in an interview with CBS, telling the news site his reasons for doing so:

"I was definitely in a spiral of work and partying that probably would've ended not well. But also, I think, as much as I needed a break, I think the public needs a break from you. If you continually are just in everyone's face the whole time, eventually they're gonna be like, 'Eehhh, yeah, you know what, I'm cool.'"

That's a fairly good point and certainly not untrue when considering how some celebrities are never out of the news cycle. After his time off, he began to tease some new material, then at the beginning of 2017, he released his third album ÷ to wide acclaim. It's this album that the song Perfect was released on. Once again, Sheeran was at the top of his game and became Spotify's most-streamed artist for 2017.  The last few years have seen the musician work on a number of high-profile collaborations, with artists such as Beyonce, Andrea Bocelli, Justin Bieber, and Bruno Mars, among many others. Rounding out the 2010s, Spotify named Sheeran the second most-streamed artist of the decade behind Drake.

Sheeran's success story is so impressive that it's a common topic for publications to discuss. From how he's managed to build his career to such heights in such a short amount of time, to how he's able to become the artist who's made the most money from a single tour, Sheeran's rise to the top is both elusive and rather simple. Perhaps to everyone but Ed Sheeran himself. In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, the musician explained why he wasn't surprised by his success:

“Because the music I write is like love songs with big hooks, I kind of knew it would end up where it’s ended up if it got the right radio play.”

Ed Sheeran's talent that he's developed throughout his still very young life combined with his work ethic is the recipe for his success. And his willingness to be open about how he's gotten to the top is generous to his fellow younger musicians, just like Peyton Littleton. If the budding musician keeps up his work, who knows where his future will take him. What is for certain is that Peyton Littleton has the love for music that Ed Sheeran also had as a young man, and it's clear that the public, including his classmates and the internet, are already big fans.

What did you think of Peyton Littleton's performance? Are you a fan of Ed Sheeran's music? Could you imagine Littleton forging a music career just like Sheeran? Let us know in the comments and be sure to tell your friends. We would love to hear what you all think of his amazing performance!