Would Ed Sheeran be Ed Sheeran if he wasn’t ginger? His iconic mop of bright-orange hair seems so central to his whole thing that it’s difficult to imagine him any other way.
Because there’s something about Sheeran, isn’t there? He’s not your usual stadium-sell-out multi-platinum acoustic-guitar-playing love-song-singing artist; he’s different from your Lewis Capaldis and your Paolo Nutinis and your Tallest Men On Earth (all, incidentally, brunettes). He’s special.
Yet his specialness has always rested on his not seeming very special at all. Sheeran grafted his way from East Anglian homeboy to the 21st century’s biggest pop prodigy, touring the world with nothing but his guitar (small) and loop pedal (ubiquitous), picking up friends in high places – Elton John is his mentor, Taylor Swift his pal – and narrating the love lives of hundreds of thousands of Radio 1 listeners.
His records have sold more than 150 million copies. His ÷ (Divide) tour famously “grossed half a billi” (-on pounds). He is the third most listened-to artist on Spotify. Yet unlike contemporary artists of a similar stature – Adele, Swift, Stormzy – there is tension surrounding him. A defensiveness, of sorts. An unlikeliness that he cannot – or perhaps is unwilling to – shake. And so, 12 years into his career, as he releases his new album, – (Subtract), and he celebrates his victory in court against a third major plagiarism claim, the question remains intriguing. Ed Sheeran: how and why?
Born in 1991 and raised in rural Suffolk, Sheeran always knew he wanted to be a musician. He dropped out of school in 2008 to move to London and start on the gig circuit – a part of his life now much mythologised. He gigged endlessly with his tiny guitar and his loop pedal, staying on sofas and occasionally sleeping rough.
It’s easy to forget just how much he rapped. This and his grassroots style got him in on the grime scene before it became mainstream with the success of artists like Stormzy; in 2010 the DJ and producer Jamal Edwards asked him to perform on his YouTube channel, SBTV. After he broke through, he became good friends with the rapper Example, with whom he made the YouTube hit “Nando’s Skank”. Back then he was anathema to the screaming synths of the trash party anthems and even to the pastoral soundscapes of Marcus Mumford. Now his sound is synonymous with the mainstream.
Sheeran’s authentic, guy-down-the-pub vibe doesn’t just stem from his backstory. It’s been there all along in his relaxed, chatty stage presence; his openness in interviews (though he has seemed naturally more aloof since he quit social media for good in 2019).
But perhaps most significantly, it’s there in his music. There is a sense of transparency in his penchant for lyrical literality – his last album opened with the indisputably unambiguous line “I am grown up, I am a father now” – and in the sheer scale of his output. Sheeran has said recently that writing songs is his “therapy” – his wife, Cherry Seaborn, recalled on The Sum of It All, the documentary series Sheeran released with Disney+ this week, that following some bad news in early 2022 he retreated to his studio and wrote seven songs in four hours. Judging by the multiple albums that he told Rolling Stone last month he has stacked up ready to go, this level of creative output is not anomalous.
The emotional responses to said bad news are the foundations of Subtract, which is what differentiates it as, perhaps, soul-baring rather than just self-aware, raw rather than just honest. In February 2022 Jamal Edwards, who had, following that early YouTube collaboration, become Sheeran’s best friend, died suddenly from a heart attack brought on by alcohol and cocaine use. Just weeks previously, Sheeran had found out that Seaborn – then pregnant with their second child – had a cancerous tumour that was untreatable until she’d given birth.
The album is produced by Taylor Swift collaborator and The National guitarist Aaron Dessner, which lends a misty, gossamer feel – like that of Swift’s Folklore – to the wade through grief, sadness and confusion. In a handwritten diary entry, photographed by Annie Leibowitz and posted to social media, Sheeran wrote that Subtract would not be the “perfect acoustic album” he originally had in mind, but instead a “trapdoor into my soul”. There is not a “Shape of You” or “You Need Me” in sight: this is slow, mournful; neat feelings, no ice. One lyric in particular is a pleasing microcosm of what the album says about Sheeran’s career: “Is this the ending of our youth when pain starts taking over?”
Yet for all its novel melancholy, Subtract is also consistent with the quintessential Sheeran style. He has the knack for writing almost unbearably catchy melodies and artfully constructed songs; like a chef cooking his signature dish, he deploys with every four-chord, four-chorus therapeutic outburst an infallible combination of ingredients that hit your tastebuds with salt, sugar, creamy sauce and delicious crunch at just the right moments.
He did not gradually cultivate this ability to write almost-too-perfect pop: he has always had an instinctive sense for exactly how to make it. His first ever single, “The A Team”, was already the platonic ideal of a Sheeran song: it opens with soft, mournful, Tracy Chapman-esque guitar, followed by Sheeran’s tender tenor vocal. Light strings enter at the second verse, and the song builds, oh-so steadily, until a stripped-back chorus provides a subversive, slightly cynical, gut-punch climax. Tracking the structure of his subsequent hits, most of them deploy this same sturdy, comforting formula – from 2014’s “Photograph” to 2017’s “Perfect” to “Boat”, the lead single from Subtract (which is about being battered by waves of depression – a rare but welcome use of metaphor).
Sheeran has musical tics beyond form and structure. He banks guitar phrases to emphasise cadences (listen to “Lego House”, another sweet-natured, mid-tempo track from his debut album + (Plus), and you’ll hear the same little lick as in “The A Team”); it hardly needs saying that he makes excellent use of the tonic, or home note, using it at the centre of ascending and descending melodies, or simply staying on it for a while.
To name his tendencies towards melodic simplicity and repeated motifs is far from an indictment of Sheeran: they make his songs memorable and addictive, if a little bland. Save for a few genre crossovers on Divide – an album panned for its cynical forays into Irish folk and calypso and which laid plain Sheeran’s commercial mindset – at its purest, the music tends to feels airy and light – rarely overwrought.
Unfortunately, the same reverence cannot be applied to Sheeran’s lyrics. The creative incontinence that fuels his prolific output appears to preclude any agonising over the poetry – and the musical airiness shows the dust. His literality is nothing on his cheesiness (“Baby, I’m dancing in the dark/With you between my arms/Barefoot on the grass/Listening to our favourite song”, goes the 2017 love song “Perfect”, streamed 2.5 billion times) – and his cheesiness has little on his strange grammatical shortcuts (“push and pull like a magnet do”). These are, of course, common traits in mainstream pop – but in Sheeran’s songs the lyrics feel more exposed. Not only does his acoustic sound leave them rather bare, but he also uses melody – which is his strong point – to emphasise the words, hammering home the meaning.
This unabashedness about both his straight-up lyrics and his failsafe musical formula – the kind of sincerity it’s virtually impossible to find in the postmodern age of Online – is clearly the reason Sheeran has never been “cool”. Among certain factions (softbois on Hinge, 6Music dads, urbane millennials, world-weary journalists) he is the perfect target for mockery – though not more so than his fans are, who, if you were being particularly mean-spirited, you could say represented a kind of unthinking mass of brainwashed normos looking for an unchallenging emotional outlet.
Those who constitute this mass, of course, could not be less conscious of his or their reputation, or, for that matter, care a single iota about it. To his fans Sheeran is simply the purveyor of all your favourite songs, with a beautiful voice and a charming manner – the type of guy who, despite his propensity to sell out Wembley and his enjoyment of six-figure watches, you would happily invite to the pre-night-out meal at Zizzi.
Unlike his blissfully unaware fan base, Sheeran knows how he is perceived. “I’m not an idiot,” he told Rolling Stone in March 2023. “When you say in your office, ‘I’m gonna go and interview Ed Sheeran,’ you must get sneers. I’ve always been that guy.” And yet, as his acquaintance Beyoncé once said, the “best revenge is your paper”. With a net worth of $200m, Sheeran continues to do exactly what he’s always done and reap the rewards, with derision from critics and cool kids having absolutely zero effect on his doting audience or material success.
He recently dismissed the relevance of music critics in the streaming era, suggesting people could listen and make up their own minds – a reasonable coping mechanism for someone with 83 million monthly Spotify listeners and a slew of two-star newspaper reviews. Pitting himself against the critics also helps further the brand: despite all that commercial success, he is still, on some level, the underdog.
Conversely, the multiple accusations of plagiarism levelled at Sheeran over the past few years have touched him. In the Leibowitz photo Sheeran writes that “defending his integrity as a songwriter” was another contributing factor to his annus horribilis (one explored in more depth in The Sum of It All). Most recently, an American court has just ruled that Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” was not a copy of “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye. Sheeran had told the New York court on 1 May that if he lost the case he would quit music, having previously defended himself – successfully – against a claim that he ripped off the “Shape Of You” beat from a relatively unknown producer, Sami Chokri.
As in most pop plagiarism trials, Sheeran’s defence rested largely on the fact that most pop songs tend to use similar chord sequences and are wont to sound alike. In 2022, when he won the “Shape Of You” case, he said in a rare public statement: “Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify. That’s 22 million songs a year, and there’s only 12 notes that are available.” We might also remember that according to his wife, Sheeran himself has been known to write – if my maths serves me correctly – 1.75 songs per hour.
Conversations about pop plagiarism remind us of the genre’s intrinsic monotony – or perhaps mundanity. Sheeran is, in a sense, pop personified: doggedly consistent, hopelessly romantic, ambitious, unashamed and obsessive. Since his debut album rocketed to the top of the charts in 2011 and he suddenly became the best-known British redhead since Prince Harry, Sheeran has been manning his factory, churning out the same perfect product again and again, with no real need to vary the process.
His new album is raw, yes – but, just as Plus was, it’s also a direct, uncomplicated portrayal of where he is now. He will be lauded, in 2023, for his emotive outpourings about grief, but they are expressed using the same exacting methods as when he sang, aged 20, that “You and I ended over U.N.I.”. If the Sheeran universe were Cordon Bleu, we’re talking about the difference between hollandaise and bearnaise.
In some ways, then, Sheeran is a pin-up for pop-star realism. He had a talent for music, nurtured for years. He ground and grafted, furiously beatboxing and looping, brushing off criticism and trying, trying and trying again until finally something broke through. Remove the money and fame that ensued and it sounds pretty ordinary, if lucky.
And yet, just as Ed Sheeran would not be Ed Sheeran if he wasn’t ginger, he also would not be Ed Sheeran if he wasn’t gratingly literal; if he didn’t love Nando’s; if he was at all worried his love songs were too corny; if he didn’t do things like describe himself as a “binge dad”; if he made a song without acoustic guitar; if, for that matter, he did anything slightly differently.
He’s right: coincidence is bound to happen. But it would be wrong to suggest that any mundanity in his stardom – as in his most addictive, infuriatingly perfect pop songs – is not offset by a more than a little bit of magic.
