Today we’re looking at “Supermarket Flowers” by the pop master himself, Ed Sheeran, and wow, what a beautiful little tune. It’s actually a sad and beautiful little tune, so good luck getting through this one without shedding a few tears.

Ed Sheeran’s songs aren’t particularly easy, but this one is simple enough that you should be able to get through it while adding in some interesting bits here and there. It’s a good one to play around with once you’ve got the basic chord structure and fingerpicking pattern down.

Speaking of fingerpicking patterns, this song is usually played on the piano. In fact, there’s not much to the song at all – most of it is primarily piano and vocals. Even the build towards the end is super subtle, and there’s hardly any percussion throughout the whole arrangement (if any at all). All of that to say this is a pretty perfect tune to translate over to a fingerstyle guitar piece. If you haven’t already, check out my folk fingerstyle module on the website for more practice with it.

One thing I do want to mention - if you notice here, I’m playing my F chord with my thumb over the top of the neck fretting the thickest string. Most beginners will find that this is actually more difficult to do than just playing the full bar chord, but this song – or any song with a lot of G and C chords, for that matter – is a great one for practicing the F chord with the thumb. If you’ve gone through my beginner’s course, you know that I usually discourage the thumb creeping over on the neck too much because keeping the thumb behind the neck really helps to strengthen those hand muscles there. Of course, if you can figure out both ways to play your F, that’s really the best, anyway.