the mommy avenger

There’s something almost absurd about driving into Las Vegas — a city built entirely on spectacle, on things designed to overwhelm you — and still walking away thinking the biggest show in town that night was one guy with an acoustic guitar and a loop pedal. But that’s exactly what happened on July 18, 2026, when Ed Sheeran brought the LOOP Tour to Allegiant Stadium, and by the time the lights came up, thousands of people understood exactly why it’s called that.

I’ve always thought Ed Sheeran is one of the last true “one-man-band” arena acts left. No dancers, no pyrotechnics doing the heavy lifting, no lip-syncing to a backing track. It’s him, a guitar, and a machine that lets him record himself in real time and play it back — building entire songs, layer by layer, in front of you. Watching him do that live isn’t just a nostalgia trip through the hits; it’s watching someone build something from nothing, in real time, with no safety net. That’s a rare thing at the stadium level in 2026, and it’s exactly why people who’ve seen him three or four times keep buying tickets to see him again.

The name isn’t just clever branding — it’s literal. Sheeran built his whole career busking on street corners with a Boss RC-30 loop pedal, recording a guitar riff, a percussive tap on the guitar body, a vocal harmony, then looping them all together until one person sounds like a full band. The LOOP Tour, in support of his album Play, leans all the way into that origin story: the stage is set up in the round in the middle of the field, so there genuinely isn’t a bad seat in a stadium, and the whole show is built around him constructing songs live, loop by loop, in front of everyone rather than hiding the trick.

Sheeran brought Myles Smith, Sigrid, and Aaron Rowe along for the Vegas stop, and it’s worth showing up on time for them. It’s a smart bill — Sigrid’s pop energy, Myles Smith’s soulful acoustic stuff, and Aaron Rowe (who’s been a fixture on this whole tour) all warmed the stadium up nicely before the main event.

The Vegas-style setlist for the night looked something like this:

• You Need Me, I Don’t Need You
• Sapphire
• Castle on the Hill
• The A Team
• Shivers
• Don’t
• Eyes Closed
• Lego House
• Tenerife Sea
• Heaven
• Supermarket Flowers
• Give Me Love
• Galway Girl
• Nancy Mulligan
• Old Phone
• Photograph
• I Don’t Care
• Celestial
• Thinking Out Loud
• Camera
• Perfect
• I See Fire
• Bloodstream
• Shape of You
• Azizam
• Bad Habits
  
  
  
  That mid-show run is where the “magic” really happens — Sheeran stripping a song down to almost nothing, looping a guitar line, a beatbox layer, a harmony, until a stadium of thousands of people is singing a part back to him that he built thirty seconds earlier. It’s a genuinely different feeling than watching a full band hit a cue. Each time I see him, I am so amazed at the sheer magnitude of his talents.

The thing that gets you isn’t any single moment — it’s the accumulation. “Thinking Out Loud” turning into thousands of phone flashlights. “Galway Girl” turning the whole stadium into one giant Irish pub singalong. Then a hush falling over the place for something quieter and stripped-down, just him and a loop, and somehow that quiet moment landing just as hard as the pyro-adjacent pop songs. By the time “Bad Habits” and “Shape of You” closed things out, it didn’t feel like watching a concert so much as watching one guy prove, for two hours and forty minutes straight, that he didn’t need any of Vegas’s usual tricks to hold a stadium in his hand.

If you’re on the fence about catching this tour elsewhere — it’s absolutely worth it! Check out the upcoming dates here.