British singer Ed Sheeran has completed a pentalogy of albums named after mathematical symbols. On the final recording of Subtract called symbol – he tries to articulate feelings from a difficult period of his life. The unusually personal songs, however, suffer from too much descriptiveness. In the accompanying TV documentary, the performer reiterates that he is not just a hit machine. Even the first man of pop can sometimes be too much.
“When I started, I wanted to make five math albums,” the 32-year-old singer-songwriter describes his vision in the TV documentary Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All, which runs concurrently with the new album published ve videotéce Disney+.
At the turn of the 1990s and 1990s, he played in pubs, small clubs or on the street, but even then he had a long-term business plan in his head, how to rapidly increase the size of his stages. “Plus was supposed to be an addition to the material I had recorded up to that point,” he recalls of the 2011 debut. this,” he gets to the news item Subtract posted last Friday.
The plan exceeded expectations. For example, in December 2019, the Official Charts Company, which aggregates the charts of the United Kingdom, Ireland and France, she declared the most commercially successful artist of the decade. He experienced worldwide fame, in the same year, 150,000 spectators came to his two concerts in Prague’s Letňany.
Sheeran intended the last piece of the math series to be an acoustic album, perhaps as an imaginary return to his roots, when as a teenager he played, sang and rapped wherever he was allowed to stand with a guitar. The minimalistic sound of the recording preceded the announced choice of producer Aaron Dessner from the band The National, who worked on the intimate albums Folklore and Evermore by the American singer Taylor Swift.
At the same time, Subtract, which means Subtract, was supposed to be composed of songs that Sheeran had stored in a so-called drawer during the last ten years. But turbulent circumstances forced him to write a new one.
“If we make it through this year, nothing will separate us,” he says in the first words of the song No Strings to early last year, when doctors found a tumor in his wife Cherry Seaborn’s arm. As she was expecting their second daughter at the time, treatment had to wait.
“The doctor said it’s cancer and the baby’s on the way / Life changes in the blink of an eye, decisions have to be made,” Sheeran sings on the bonus track Toughest and those verses summarize his current lyrical form. Most of all, the new album feels like diary entries accompanied by a sequence of basic chords.
After Nick Cave’s son Arthur died in 2015, the Australian singer refused to be inspired by grief. On the contrary, he claimed that he is incapable of anything in depression and that it is necessary to wait until the most painful phase subsides. The myth of artists who have to suffer in order to create was also rejected by singer-songwriter Fiona Apple and other musicians. It doesn’t have to be true for everyone, but sometimes distance from the gloom is necessary, and depression slows down the creative process, or even makes it impossible.
A mute verse-beater
“It hit me like a train, I’m out of words / I’ve got nothing to say, everything hurts,” sings Ed Sheeran now, sounding like the most honest lyrics he’s written in years.
In a new song Sycamore he and his wife find themselves “in the waiting room, emotions are flowing / I’m afraid for my love, I’m afraid for our child”. Instead of transcribing feelings into lyrics, he just records their existence. The tense moments in the song are contrasted with “a leafy sycamore in the summer”, under which his girlfriend is playing with her first-born daughter on a swing. “The flowers are blooming in the garden, just imagine where we could have been,” adds Sheeran.
The British singer routinely juggles clichés, his verses are easily digested and absorbed by the audience. He partly built his success on this. Extreme situations, however, expose the banality of his handwriting to the bone. In the song Dusty describes a recent life situation with the words “we’re lost in the middle of a stormy ocean / No one knew what we were going through / We talk it out together while we dip our toes in the water / Take a breath and prepare for the next waves”.
In the TV documentary, Sheeran keeps repeating that all the hardships are too fresh for him, he hasn’t had enough to absorb them. Memories hurt him, songs can make him cry. A few weeks after his wife’s terrifying diagnosis, he was additionally affected by the death of English producer Jamal Edwards. A London businessman and manager was the first to believe in Sheeran’s talent. They were not just business partners, but close friends. Edwards he died at age 31 of cardiac arrest due to cocaine use.
Ed Sheeran looks like a person swept away by the current of responsibilities. | Photo: Annie Leibovitz
Sheeran already recorded a song for the previous year’s album named with the = symbol Visiting Hours in memory of my friend Michael Gudinski. One of the most influential men in Australian show business fell asleep in March 2021 of an overdose of a combination of medicines and drugs, he was 68 years old.
Ed Sheeran now appears on the news as a man swept up in the flow of duties resulting from the position of the first man in music show business, trying to grab a fixed point. He dedicated his whole life to music and wants to continue to do so. At the same time, two daughters were born to him, his wife went through a serious illness. The singer seemed to be on the album and not at the same time.
This is partly confirmed by the documentary The Sum of It All, specifically footage from the studio. Sheeran takes a few moments to finalize the lyrics, layer the vocals over basic chords and the ticking of a metronome, before announcing that he’s leaving the rest to the producer and that he’s going home. According to the booklet, Ed Sheeran is the sole author of only three of the fourteen songs. The scene gives the impression that he has so much faith in producer Aaron Dessner that he doesn’t care what the outcome sounds like.
Although he maintains the image of an essential soloist, he is used to composing in a team. Now he cut out his usual collaborators and wrote 25 new songs in a week with Dressner. According to Rolling Stone magazine they chose 14 of the strongest, the rest will be thrown in as bonuses for various album releases.
During the hectic creation of the Subtract album, it also changed its intended shape and moved away from a purely acoustic recording. IN Dusty in addition to the singer’s voice, there is a disjointed piano, echoes of strings and synthetic drums, v Curtains even distorted guitars. Percussive Eyes Closed is built on an economical electronic beat, v End of Youth Sheeran lays down a quasi-rap on the piano, and the self-doubting lyrics lift the arched chorus. Between the acoustic sounds of piano, guitar and strings, it is a pleasant distraction.
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The third of the singer’s traumas, which is covered in the television documentary, is the trial. Sheeran last year won plagiarism dispute over his 2017 song Shape of You, last week a New York jury agreed that the nearly decade-old hit Thinking Out Loud singer did not steal from American soul star Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On. In light of other events, Sheeran calls it banal on camera, while claiming in court that if he loses, he will end his career.
Although the title of the documentary The Sum of it All suggests that it could chart Sheeran’s entire career, the four approximately half-hour episodes revolve mainly around the events of recent years. And often they just repeat things verbatim described in the songs.
Album cover – they were Subtract. | Photo: Asylum Records
Wife Cherry Seaborn speaks publicly about her illness for the first time on record, Sheeran arrives at a gathering to honor the memory of his friend Jamal. In the morning, he stops by a mural, puts down a candle, falls into the arms of his bodyguard. During the chamber concert in the church, she cries during the new songs.
Towards the end of the series, he wonders if the moment is approaching when his career will naturally go into a phase of decline. The album Subtract also sounds like that. It will likely remain without major hits of the type Shape of You or Bad Habitswhich Sheeran wrote last year as a response to the record-breaking single Blinding Lights Canadian singer The Weeknd.
On the album Subtract, Ed Sheeran presents himself as a routine songwriter who could make a potential hit almost from the shopping list. “I hone my craft every day to be able to do this,” he says, fuming in the documentary that the lawsuits are questioning his talent and art. This is followed by editing and the spontaneous creation of the Bad Habits hit during one of the sessions with the producers.
Given the circumstances, he has now released his most open record, which fans will surely appreciate. Banal love stories are gone, however, and Subtract will also quite possibly be the first album that doesn’t take Sheeran higher than he already is. Maybe if he had waited a little longer with the stadium-filling business plan, he could have made a record about what life’s trials really brought out in him. This is how he describes what has been said a hundred times just on the floor plan of “camper” chords.
Video: Trailer z minisérie Ed Sheeran: The Sum Of It All
The miniseries Ed Sheeran: The Sum Of It All is in the Disney+ video library with Czech subtitles. | Video: Disney+
