Ed Sheeran’s -: less than the sum of its parts?
reigning heavyweight champion of musical plagiarism Ed Sheeran (total bouts 3, wins 2, by KO 2, draws 1) has taken time out from his hectic court battle schedule (Billboard, 04 may) to release new album, ‘-’ (aka Subtract), the final release of his five-album maths symbols project. it’s been quite the ascent for the suffolk-born lad, who could have scarcely imagined that someone from a snoozy english county formerly famous for nothing to be proud of could become one of the bestselling pop stars in the world.
a Disney+ four-part series into the making of and events leading up to Subtract, plus coverage of the court case over one of his earlier hits dominated pop music press to the extent that it piqued my interest. i have written about his copyright issues before, but i know next-to-nothing about him.
admittedly, i am not his target market, and he is not one of my go-to musical artists for anything. but i do love a music documentary, so my aim for watching The Sum Of It All was to know a little something of the personality behind a musical artist who has to date profited from a seemingly vacuous brand of pop. surely all singer-songwriters wish to be understood on a deeper level than a tin of Ronseal?
as ever with carefully edited portraits of celebs, i found the most revealing aspect of the show to be what constitutes normality. most noticeable for me was how often he referred to accolades, ambitions, and one of his most important friendships by the measurements of scale and volume. to take a few examples:
- we already know he writes more songs than most people have hot dinners, but at one point we learn that Sheeran wrote seven of them in four hours after hearing of his wife’s cancer tumour diagnosis. this is explained as a therapeutic exercise, but the mention of how many songs speaks to an obsessive songwriterly core.
- the progression of his career is depicted through him having ever bigger hits, set to shots of him playing ever bigger stages, giving the viewer the impression that he is the sort of person who is interested in setting records. a few passing references are made to the many nights he did at wembley stadium, in relation to Stormzy, who is yet to do it once. but no worries Big Mike, at least you did the biggest ticketed show in england with Sheeran once, eh?
- we gain a sense of the aspirational, even entrepreneurial nature of Sheeran’s unlikely relationship with SBTV founder Jamal Edwards. they spurred each other on to achieve ever greater commercial success, and when reflecting on his friend’s death, Sheeran considers a core tenet of his bond with Edwards to be an innate understanding of the eternal importance of the grind as an inspiration for pursuing further success in the entertainment industry. the cardinal rule of their shared mindset? no matter what, ‘the show must go on’.
another noticeable trait of the documentary was the degree to which it is engrained in Sheeran to perform. his compulsion to entertain comes across during a scene at a frankfurt beer hall where despite being a member of the audience, he finds himself on stage singing a rendition of one of his songs. his voiceover explains:
my friends joke that whenever there’s a stage i usually get on it.
being so open to playing anywhere when i was younger i could walk onstage with real confidence of being like “i know i can entertain you”.
but it comes from years of having your confidence battered, i think, and it just strengthens it up and up and up.
and just as Sheeran made himself a performer through sheer force of will, to be able to entertain anyone and everyone within earshot, so his experiences helped him hone the idea of what a performance is — that is to give the people what they want: tuneful, straightforwardly relatable enough pop fodder — and this is an indispensable component of every one of his songs, more still his ego (although for the sake of the documentary’s narrative arc, the viewer is left in no doubt of the main character’s epiphany: that there is more to life than performing songs, namely the love of friends and family).
critics also wish for Sheeran to make something more of his craft, hence almost unanimously negative reviews of his recorded output to date, often on the charge that it lacks the pretension towards grand artistic ideas and statements. while he appears to have assumed an unofficial status as the People’s Minstrel™ for his tales of ordinary lives doing ordinary things, there is a hope from some quarters for Sheeran to elevate those relatable qualities to that of someone like Bruce Springsteen, who used the bombast of rock’n’roll to transform the hopes and fears of blue collar US workers’ lives into musical melodramas. or, by way of a british comparison, to become a worthy heir to Mike Skinner of The Streets. yet, Sheeran stands apart in yearning only for the adulation of the widest cross-section of audiences possible.
until Subtract, the sadboi album, the risk-taker, the magnum opus revealing his ‘deepest darkest fears’, the one that will prove the critics wrong about his artistry. oh, wait (Rolling Stone, 21 mar)…
Sheeran wouldn’t mind making new fans with Subtract, but he doesn’t need your grudging acceptance. ‘Someone who’s never liked my music ever? And sees me as the punchline to a joke? For him to suddenly be like, “Oh, you’re not as shit as I thought you were?’ That doesn’t mean anything.”’
Sheeran can be a tad sensitive to non-fans criticism though. hence the exchange noted in the magazine interview when someone on Twitter accused him of making ‘sex anthems for boring people’, to which he *somewhat* self-effacingly responded ‘150 million boring people, by the way’.
Ed Sheeran in Rolling Stone
Boring Lives Matter indeed. and Sheeran is preoccupied with how they will buy into the new work (Guardian, 28 apr):
adding to the pressure… is the question of whether fans of a pop everyman who has built his career on relatability will engage with a deeply personal record that pivots from his usual spread-betting genre fare to focus on a single, melancholy sound.
on hearing it, i see no reason why they wouldn’t. the lead single Eyes Closed already topped the uk singles chart, in part because it sounds similar to the rest of his oeuvre: a straightforward chord progression, a predictable build from the verse to chorus, a singable chorus, etc, etc. the rest of the album is more-or-less the same fare, soaked in Aaron Dessner of The National’s poignant studio production sheen. it’s giving less first-wedding-dance-for-suv-liberals vibes, and more this-is-how-i-process-my-grief-musically-within-a-restrictive-pop-song-format vibes.
artistically, Subtract isn’t as great a risk as Charlie Chaplin deciding to make The Great Dictator in the run up to world war two, and commercially, it’s not Scott 4 — it will chart. nevertheless, Sheeran does give more of himself as a person rather than as a songwriter to his fandom, and how they react will mean more to him than any album or ticket tour sales or critic reviews.
so, as it doesn’t matter what non-fans think, i have nothing to say about Subtract. its songs will be performed for endless crowds of adoring fans, regardless. i just hope that on one of those occasions, he will end a set with an encore medley of Thinking Out Loud x Shape Of You x Photograph in dedication to all the plaintiffs he’s defeated. there’s no sound on earth like the sweet sound of success.