As Sheeran finishes arc, songs struggle to find happy endings
“There’s beauty when it’s bleak,” Ed Sheeran reminds himself in “Boat,” the opening song on his new album, “-” (pronounced “Subtract”). Mortality loomed around the British musician in 2022, the year he wrote most of the songs on “-,” and it’s reflected in the music: subdued, primarily acoustic and down-tempo, and a long way from the big beats and brash productions of its predecessor, “=,” (“Equals”) in 2021. Its songs balance between despair and reassurance, barely tilting toward optimism. “If we make it through this year, then nothing can break us,” he vows in “No Strings.”
In a Disney+ documentary series, “Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All,” Sheeran says the album reveals his “deepest, darkest thoughts.” His latest songs cope with pain, depression and mourning, and they struggle to find happy endings.
In “End of Youth,” he sings, “Can’t get a handle on my grief/ When every memory turns to tears,” and in “Borderline,” he admits, “Sadness always finds an in/ Sneaks its way past infecting everything.”
In “Toughest,” a bonus track, Sheeran sings, “The doctor said it’s cancer, and a baby’s on the way.” That’s reportage: Sheeran’s wife, Cherry Seaborn, was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in her arm while pregnant with their second child, Jupiter. (She received treatment after the child was born.)
In February 2022, Sheeran’s close friend Jamal
Edwards died at 31; he was a YouTube tastemaker, producer, entrepreneur and DJ who gave Sheeran pivotal early recognition.
In 2022 and into this year, Sheeran also faced multiple lawsuits over accusations of plagiarism, since he tends to use chord progressions and structures that give his songs pop’s instant familiarity. At times, he has added songwriting credits as resemblances emerged.
Still, Sheeran spent much of 2022 and 2023 as a touring superstar, headlining stadiums worldwide. Over the past decade, he has proved himself to be a consummate, driven 21st-century musician: gifted, career-minded and supremely adaptable yet easily recognizable, writing songs that revel in direct language and big feelings.
Sheeran has made himself the USB port of pop songwriting, connecting with virtually everything. He can reach back to the tunefulness of his Irish forebears, croon in an R&B falsetto, wax folky and introspective, pump up a rock anthem, deliver a perky pop chorus or flaunt the syncopated flow of a rapper. He has written or collaborated on folk-pop, hip-hop, grime, K-pop, R&B, Afrobeats, Latin pop, movie themes, reggaeton, electronic dance music and more — too prolific to be contained.
His new album completes a five-album arc of arithmetic symbols, with “-” following “+” (2011), “x” (2014), “÷” (2017) and “=” (2021). Per its title, “-” was intended to be a strippeddown singer-songwriter album, though Sheeran has by no means renounced big pop choruses.
“-” was produced by Aaron Dessner, the keyboardist and guitarist from the National. Sheeran built most of the songs on instrumental tracks by Dessner: sparse piano or guitar chords leading to stately choruses, often burnished with somber string arrangements.
They’re sturdy songs, even as Sheeran sings about fragile emotions. In the hymnlike “Salt Water,” he contemplates drowning and possibly suicide, with a choir rising behind him to share the line “Embrace the deep and leave everything”; then he shrugs it off, singing, “It was just a dream.” In “Life Goes On,” over a fitfully strummed guitar, he begs, “Tell me how/ How my life goes on with you gone?” and then wills himself forward: “Easy come, hard go/ Then life goes on.”
Obviously, Sheeran doesn’t worry about verbal cliches — though in these songs, the sorrowful tone makes them sound more unguarded than banal.
The album does have a stealth pop tune: “Eyes Closed,” which Sheeran started in 2018 with hitmaker Max Martin and rewrote as a song to mourn Edwards: “Every song reminds me you’re gone.” Acoustic instruments — cello, guitar — carry the staccato arrangement, but the chorus still works up a hefty beat and an “eye-yiyi-eyes” vocal hook. Even in his deepest, darkest moments, Sheeran invites a pop singalong.