Throughout the first half of the record, bereavement and Sheeran’s mental health elicit watery metaphors songs called Salt Water and Boat. “Life just goes on,” he notes in the lyrics to Eyes Closed – a theme he picks up on again on the following track, Life Goes On. ![]() One of the reasons he remains popular is that Sheeran is a songsmith who follows the Ernest Hemingway line that straightforward writing is often the most effective writing. This generation’s songwriter-in-chief is ideally placed to reopen the discussion around male mental health Universals wrapped in specifics remain a constant in Sheeran’s everyman offering. Eyes Closed, a mid-tempo album song about going out to numb your pain, also nods to the abrupt loss of Edwards (“no one is ever ready”) while remaining broad enough to encompass all sorts of heartache. A grime entrepreneur whose DIY YouTube channel did much to crowbar Black British music towards the mainstream, Edwards’s early support lent the singer-songwriter no little credibility, often in short supply from other quarters.Īlthough it does not appear on the album, Sheeran’s one-off track – the freestyle rap F64, released in January – made it plain that his feelings about Edwards’s death were still raw. He and Sheeran had been close, to the point where many had wondered if they were more than friends – a rumour Sheeran can now chuckle fondly over in interviews. The most obvious absence in these 14 tracks is that of Jamal Edwards, the late SBTV founder who died suddenly in January 2022. ![]() There is one major loss at the heart of this record, and some near misses you may consider Sheeran’s recent period of depression – another of Subtract’s recurrent themes – as a kind of defining emptiness around which the album orbits. Billed as his starkest and most candid record yet, – (AKA Subtract) concludes Sheeran’s run of mathematically themed albums with a diaristic account of how slings and arrows can come at a successful singer-songwriter, often out of nowhere. ![]() Appositely, the British singer-songwriter’s fifth studio album details what an absolute humdinger your early 30s can be. He is also mourning the recent death of his Irish grandmother, the subject of his 2017 song Galway Girl. A s I finished writing this review, the news broke that Ed Sheeran had been cleared of infringing copyright in his latest high-profile trial, one that has been so frustrating that the singer-songwriter threatened to “quit music” if the courts didn’t find in his favour.
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