With two endings, Sheeran’s third album divides …and conquers
Another triumph on the cards for this unlikely musical icon
At midnight as Thursday flopped into Friday, Ed Sheeran’s third album was released. It’s quite likely that by the time you read this, Divide will already be the biggestselling album of the year. Record stores opened around the world to satisfy demand for the red-headed singer-songwriter’s latest opus. Spotify, iTunes and other vendors unleashed Divide digitally at the same time to those less inclined to get wet in a queue in Ireland, Britain or elsewhere in this hemisphere.
Sheeran stands as a most unlikely musical icon but one on a par with Adele, Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen and any others, female or male, that you feel like conjuring up as a comparison. He can hang out with James Blunt and nearly be decapitated by Princess Beatrice – as she tried to ‘knight’ him with a sword during late-night hijinks – or slap Justin Bieber in the mouth with a golf club at the Canadian singer’s behest without a dent to his credibility or popularity.
Ed Sheeran is the ordinary everyman partaking of the excesses of success – but still doing the business where it matters.
The 26-year-old’s first two singles, Shape Of You and Castle On The Hill took up the No.1 and No.2 spots on charts around the world on their January 6 release.
The former is a piece of shuffling folk pop with hip-hop inclinations that is his stock in trade. Yes, fans of Walking On Cars are right to note that the ‘hey ya, hey ya’ refrain bears a marked similarity to the Dingle band’s
Speeding Cars. I doubt, though, that they will be rushing to their lawyers – no more than Out Kast will be running to theirs crying plagiarism.
You can hear more than a hint of another of Ireland’s musical exports about the other early missive from Divide. Castle On The Hill is built upon U2-style chiming guitars. It’s an anthem that doesn’t get lost in its own drama; he resists the temptation to saddle it with multitrack textural layers. Like every song on Divide, he will reproduce it easily with his trusty acoustic guitar and electronic box of tricks in the arenas and stadiums of the world this summer.
Eraser, which opens the album, finds him wrestling with the implications of success like a good Catholic boy guiltily berating himself for his own talent and good fortune.
‘Welcome to the new show but my heart will stay sane,’ he sings. ‘I’ll find comfort in my pain.’
The rap interlude is quite intense, like an Eminem-style mea culpa in advance of future imagined transgressions.
Although the future is, as yet, an unexplored universe for Ed, you feel he respects himself too much to lose himself in a moment or to (truly) ever let it go to such an extent where he brings shame upon himself.
He sings of drinking ‘cheap spirits’ with friends while much younger – but is careful to stress that he is still friends with those same boyhood acquaintances. When he sings of doing that down ‘old country lanes’ he reminds us he is that he is more rural than urban in any sense.
When he croons: ‘Don’t call me baby unless you mean it. Don’t tell me you need me if you don’t believe it’ on the slow, slightly bluesy Dive he displays a familiar believable vulnerability. You are left thinking: ‘Yes, Ed, we know you are a small ginger-haired man but you are also one who can squire Taylor Swift around the world’s finest night spots for a period in time. When he tells us that ‘a club is not the best place to find a lady, so the pub is where I go’, he is restating his preference for ordinariness, lest we were ever in any doubt that he changed. The track Perfect displays a subtle but surprising sonic shift. It is like a throwback to the early doowop pastiches of Carole King and Gerry Goffin in the early sixties. You can imagine him singing the song into one of the old metal microphones in a video homage. Steve Earle and, by extension, Mundy may cheer or curse him for writing a song called Galway Girl. It is destined to become a rabblerousing favourite like the Texan’s similarly titled effort. He namechecks the City of Tribes and Grafton Street in the first two lines. When they hear it, Tourism Ireland will be sitting like the cat that got the cream, without contributing a subvention.
‘She beat me at darts and then she beat me at pool and she kissed me like there was nobody else in the room’ he sings and gets that killer line to fit the meter of the song while fiddles squall a little predictably in the background.
‘She played her fiddle in an Irish band,’ he sings ‘but she fell in love with an English man.’
This is young Mr Sheeran stating that, despite appearances, he is very much of Albion. Then he is off to New York on his lyrical travels in Happier. ‘Walking down 29th and Park I saw you in another’s arms. Ain’t nobody hurt you like I hurt you.’
Empathise with me if you like, he seems to be saying, but I’m a badass too. If that track is a throwaway then you wouldn’t tar What
Do I Know? with that brush. He quotes his father telling him ‘don’t you get involved in politics, religion or people’s quotes’.
What does Ed Sheeran think of Donald Trump or the implications of Brexit? It’s doubtful you will ever hear him pontificating on either. He’s ‘just a boy with a oneman show’ who will, he says, know the true meaning of life when he has children of his own. ‘Love, understanding and positivity’ is his simple creed, he tells us.
Supermarket Flowers is a tearjerker for the ages. He sings of his feelings at the funeral of his grandmother. On the deluxe version, which many will buy, we get the bouncy excursion that is Barcelona, which has been a feature of his live set in one shape or another for some years.
Nancy Mulligan is another shoutout to the Irishness in his make up while Bibia Be Ye Ye tries on some African pop clothes that fit him very snugly. Whether you feel Supermarket
Flowers or the equally sincere ballad Save Yourself is a natural closer (on the Deluxe version) to album No.3 is up to your own personal preferences as a consumer. 16 songs? 12 songs?
Divide conquers.
‘Ed Sheeran is an ordinary everyman partaking of the excesses of success but still doing the business’