Ed Sheeran’s Subtract is a raw, powerful balm for suffering souls
This week, Ed Sheeran suggested he may quit making music if he lost the plagiarism suit (over alleged similarities between his 2014 hit Thinking Out Loud and Marvin Gaye’s 1973 classic Let’s Get It On) that he has now won. To which, no doubt, many curmudgeonly pop haters would have crowed good riddance. But his moving and surprising new album potently demonstrates why that would be a shameful loss to music.
As should be clear from anyone who has followed his improbable rise from street busker to stadium superstar, Sheeran has always been a man with a plan. There has never been a troubadour like him, an acoustic guitar-strumming one-man band who has pushed the folky singer-songwriter genre to the hot centre of the 21st century pop mainstream armed with loop pedals, earworm hooks and a deep affinity for the rhythms of electronic dance music and cadences of hip hop.
In his world conquering mathematical sequence of albums (+, x, ÷ and =), Sheeran’s end game was always Subtract (-), a work that would strip pop adornments away to focus on pure songcraft, a chance to measure himself against the artistic giants of his chosen field, in the profound realm of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell rather than the commercial zones of Elton John and Carole King.
That would represent a big challenge for any songwriter, with daunting implications of pretension and hubris. Yet last year he was thrown off course. As narrated in his new Disney+ documentary, The Sum of it All, his wife was diagnosed with cancer in January, then his best friend Jamal Edwards died suddenly in February, while he was already facing another plagiarism case which he eventually won in April. And so Sheeran engaged in a quite different and arguably bolder act of subtraction, scrapping all the songs he had been hoarding to concoct this darker, richer version of Subtract instead.
“It’s been a long year and we’re not even halfway there,” he sings on End of Youth, circling around a sense of helplessness on a diaristic album where he turns his people pleasing instincts inwards, focusing on bewilderment at the ways life defies the best laid plans. “We spend our youth with arms and hearts wide open / And then the dark gets in.”
He sets the tone with opening track and latest single, Boat, just a delicate but sonorous acoustic guitar underpinned by barely perceptible electronic ambience as Sheeran’s high, pliant voice evokes a man adrift in a stark, watery landscape, caught between despair and the hopeful conviction that “the waves won’t break my boat.” The watery imagery becomes more morbid as Sheeran pitches further into depression on the doleful Salt Water, fantasising about literally drowning his sorrows to “embrace the deep and leave everything.”
Suicidal ideation is probably not something Sheeran’s mass mainstream audience would expect from their plucky hero, even if he tosses listeners and himself the slender lifeline of “it was just a dream.” The mood is sombre and restrained, with subtle washes of percussion and synth buoying a cyclical guitar chord sequence that could easily have been layered up into an epic.
But under the subtle guidance of producer and collaborator Aaron Dessner (multi-instrumentalist with alt rock masters The National who has taken on a similar role with Taylor Swift), Sheeran mostly manages to restrain his populist instincts and let songs unfold at a measured pace. The result is a fluid, emotional, anxious and atmospheric album of therapeutic self-healing, in which the raw immediacy of Sheeran’s feelings takes priority, shaking and warping material in subtle, twisty and deeply personal directions. In the process, Subtract has become something less strategic than originally planned and more interesting for it.
That is not to suggest the album is one dimensional. You can take the superstar out of the stadiums but you can’t take away the craft and charisma that got him there. For the first single Eyes Closed, Sheeran hedged his bets by inviting super-producer Max Martin to help turn it into another chart-topping power ballad.
Yet crucially it doesn’t feel out of place in context of the album, helping maintain a sense of variety and flexibility with other songs that brush up against contemporary pop. None of them are exactly bangers, but there is a welcome sense of shifting dynamics provided by the delicate R’n’B of Dusty, the acoustic hip hop of End of Youth and surprisingly fierce Curtains, which threatens to turn into a heavy rock anthem, albeit as if played by sensitive folkies who don’t wish to wake the neighbours.
These songs provide an accessible spine to Sheeran’s least demonstrative album, alongside the simple succour and communal emotional heft of relatively straight down the line ballads such as the gorgeous Colourblind, sweet No Strings, tender Sycamore and even the folky Hills of Aberfeldy, a Celtic love song that just about displaces the bad taste of trite 2017 smash Galway Girl.
Sheeran has long since proven himself a master of standard song forms: the simple chord changes, regular rhythms and classic verse-bridge-chorus structures that have powered pop music through the ages. Arguably, the sheer familiarity of such elements lies at the root of the plagiarism accusations that have dogged him. On Subtract, such familiar elements provide the support to keep the drowning Sheeran buoyant, while he battles despair amidst the swampy moods of Borderline, Life Goes On and Vega, songs that sink and rise, tumble and spill, embracing ambiguity and refusing to bend into prefabricated shapes.
Yet it is with his least controlling and most urgently expressive material that Sheeran suggests he is capable of more than measuring up to his musical heroes, but rather carving out a space uniquely his own. “We’ll build a fire and torch our old lives / And hope the spark survives,” he sings in a firm falsetto imbued with conviction on the gently uplifting Spark.
Even at his most downbeat, Sheeran clearly finds music a balm for suffering souls, with the result that an album born of grief and depression is not remotely hard going. Sheeran may have taken out the drumbeats, dance grooves and held back on sky high choruses, but it is almost as if he can’t help but find melodies that let the light in and concoct choruses that make you want to sing along. Subtract still sounds like an Ed Sheeran album, just one that is not trying so hard to be everything to everyone all at once. Sometimes less really is more.
Subtract (-) is out now
