I Listen to Sad Songs, Singing About Love and Where it Goes Wrong

Ed Sheeran is one of the rare popular new artists this decade than managed to get his sizable fan base by pure hard work and not having a massive radio hit. His first album went Gold here and despite the lack of massive radio hits, three years after the release of that album most everyone is now familiar with The A-Team, Lego House, and Give Me Love. Making Sheeran’s success more surprising is that the singer / songwriter era of the early 00’s that he would have fit very well into is long over. The last massive hit from a member of The Mellow Show was Jason Mraz’s 2008 I'm Yours.

With his sensitive singer / songwriter image, it was jarring that the first single off his sophomore album x (pronounced “multiply”, not the letter) was the ultra poppy Sing. It may have been the most jarring first single since U2 spent the early nineties getting weirder and weirder only to close the decade out with the Pop opus Discotheque. The song is instantly Sheeran’s most (really only) danceable and inexplicably borrowing an acoustic guitar from The Doobie Brothers Listen to the Music (much like when the heavily Got to Give It Up sounding Pharrell produced track Blurred Lines last year, The Doobie Brothers are not credited). Of course the song went on to be Ed’s first instant hit and biggest to date stateside.

Unlike Pop, x is not a complete sea change. Most of the rest comes straight out of the + playbook of mainly simple acoustic tracks with confessional lyrics. The other overtly pop song follows Sing on the album and this time Don't is co-produced by Benny Blanco (who has produced ultra-bland pop songs for Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and Maroon 5) and Rick Rubin. Another small block of hip-hop influenced songs appears later on the album which include another Pharrell assisted track Runaway which is followed by the early nineties inspire hip-hop beat The Man which unfortunately features Sheeran fake rapping which were the worst parts of + too. There is probably a reason why there has not been a successful rapper with a British accent since Slick Rick.

The best of x remains when Ed sticks to his bread and butter of confessional acoustic based tracks. Instead of evolving with an in your face pop song like Sing, a better evolution would have probably been a smaller tweak to his sound like Bloodstream (also produced by Rubin) where he adds a subtle bass sound to the existing acoustic sound. But there is plenty of good here that maybe Ed Sheeran will eventually get to his seventh album: ∫.

Song to download - Bloodstream

x gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.