Finally I listened, so do I love Ed Sheeran?
You either love Ed Sheeran or you hate Ed Sheeran. These are the only two acceptable positions you can take on Ed Sheeran. No one says, “Ed Sheeran? He’s okay, I guess”. Love. Hate. That’s your lot. My working week is spent surrounded by people who hate Ed Sheeran. They assumed I hated Ed Sheeran as well. They were wrong.
The shocking truth was I didn’t hate Ed Sheeran. I had no real feelings towards Ed Sheeran because I’d never heard any Ed Sheeran. I dropped this into conversation this week and was greeted with howls of disbelief.
Ed Sheeran is everywhere — on radio, on breakfast shows, in our local soaps, even painted on our walls. He’s inescapable.
Not true! It’s easy to escape Ed Sheeran.
As I don’t listen to the radio that plays him and I don’t watch breakfast TV or Shortland Street I didn’t even have to try. True, I might have heard him in the supermarket or something, but how would I know?
The first Ed Sheeran song I ever properly heard was when he popped up in Game of Thrones for one scene and I don’t think that counts.
But the cold, hard fact — or, warm, fuzzy fact depending on where you fall on the love/hate divide — is that Ed Sheeran is the biggest musician in the world right now.
His last album, Divide, was 2017’s biggest seller and its four singles went platinum multiple times over. Tomorrow night he plays the first of six — six! — stadium shows here.
In Auckland more than 140,000 people will flock to hear the terracotta troubadour. In Dunedin, 108,000. That’s more than 5 per cent of the total population.
This is easily New Zealand’s biggest tour ever. Bigger than Adele. Bigger than Beyonce. Bigger than Foo Fighters. Bigger than Jesus? Quite possibly.
But is he any good? Popularity, after all, does not equate with quality. Maybe 5 per cent of Kiwis are out of their damned minds. Or maybe they know something 95 per cent of us don’t? I genuinely didn’t know. But I was curious to find out.
To this end I did a crash course, deep dive into Ed Sheeran’s discography. I listened to every one of his albums, excluding the live albums and his countless guest spots.
I did, however, include his early compilation album, No.5 Collaborations Project.
Unsurprisingly this is an album of collabs. Surprisingly it’s with hardcore UK grime MCs like Wiley and Sway. Grime was quick to embrace the Ed and it appears he was the scene’s go-to guy for an angelic, mellow chorus. Like a male Dido for Grime’s Eminem.
Some of the songs were pretty good. But there’s a reason Eminem only did one Stan. An album full of Stans is too many Stans.
Moving into his solo albums proper I’d hear Ed Sheeran himself regularly rockin’ the mic. A lot of people hate his raps. Not me. His unpredictable style — sometimes good, sometimes not very good — was the single most enjoyable aspect of my marathon listening session.
Well, that and the peculiar Shakira influence that occasionally shone through . . .
But I reckon he should rap more! And not just because that would cut down on all the soppy ballads. These I did not care for. ZZZzzzz. So boring! And strangely soulless.
I just couldn’t emotionally connect with them at all.
I won’t cheat and compare him to music’s great miserablists. I don’t need to. Even his saddest song has nothing on the heart-wrenching, tearjerking, emotional tour de force of Someone Like You by pop contemporary Adele. There isn’t anything in his oeuvre that hits like that song does.
But I didn’t hate him for that. It just made me feel a twinge of sadness for the people who reach for Ed Sheeran in their darkest moments to help them properly enjoy their misery. If only they’d broaden their horizons they could really be feeling so much worse. A crying shame.
As the hours strummed past it was easy to see why people love him.
He writes good, if formulaic, pop songs that aren’t short of hooks or sing-along choruses that mash wide and varied influences together into something familiar yet new-ish. He sequences his albums for maximum effect, patiently introducing and subtracting musical elements to maintain interest.
None of which meant I found Ed Sheeran’s music anything other than ferociously middle of the road.
As exciting as wallpaper and almost relentlessly humdrum.
After listening to five albums and 58 songs I arrived at the fittingly boring conclusion that nice Ed Sheeran writes nice songs for nice people. Clearly, it wasn’t for me.
So obviously I didn’t love it. Hate then? No. It didn’t inspire anywhere near enough emotion out of me for that.
Ed Sheeran? He’s okay, I guess.