Ed Sheeran and The Game confirm plans for a joint album

The Game has confirmed plans for a joint album with Ed Sheeran, promising a "crazy" double LP at the end of this year or early 2015.

"Ed came up with the idea to start working on a joint album, and we started doing it," the rapper told MTV News. "We were just planning to record one song; we ended up doing like seven." Seven became 11 and now there's so much music that the Game and Sheeran will split it into two parts: "It'll be two CDs," he said. "The way I would do an album, with his help, and the way he would do an album with my features."

"The songs that we got, they’re real songs," the Game declared. "We was just going. He was on that guitar. Acoustically, he’s a genius, man."

The team-up got its start back in December 2012, when Sheeran tweeted his admiration for the Game's album Jesus Piece. "I responded, we exchanged numbers on the DM, and then we got in the studio," the Game recalled. Though Sheeran is best known as an acoustic troubadour, the team-up is not as unlikely as all that: the 23-year-old raps on one of his new album's bonus tracks, and last year collaborated with the MC Lupe Fiasco.

Sheeran's hip-hop debut will have to wait until after the release of his second solo album, this June. Meanwhile the Game has two albums in the pipeline: a compilation called Blood Moon, out with Blood Money Entertainment this summer, and his official sixth solo album, which he hopes to put out with Cash Money. "Lawyers [are] talking," he said.

The Game has sold more than 10m albums worldwide, including more than five million copies of 2005's The Documentary, which reached number seven on the UK chart.