Ed Sheeran - In Which I Do Things To Myself Because I Worry My Hatred Might Be Irrational

I know I have anger issues. I know anger is not really the most productive or useful emotion and I should keep it in check. Yet whenever I see this fucking face...

...I can't help but want to punch it.

I have no explanation for hating Ed Sheeran so much. As of writing this sentence I really only have a general sense of the man and his talent. I can't name a single song, even though I just read an article about the Billboard Top 40 saying he had the current No. 1 single ("The Shape of Things" maybe?) So maybe it's just the fact that he has a stupid haircut or something.

Then again...

I mean that's about as bad as they come, and I'd never want to punch Robert Plant in the face. The difference is Robert Plant is responsible for some of the greatest popular music in history, music that continues to rock people's faces off nearly 50 years after it was first released. So I'll forgive a man's fashion if his output makes up for it. Especially since it's kinda unfair to knock a guy for being 80s-fabulous when everyone was doing it. Unless it's Jefferson Airplane.

My sense of Ed Sheeran is that he's not really that interested in being a rock god. My guess is he's more of a crooner, because for some reason these days that's far more popular. So if I do dive into Sheeran's entire catalog I'm guessing I'm gonna be bored to fucking tears and have even less idea as to why this man is so adored.

Must be the badass tattoos?

But at the very least I'll be informed. So we'll start with a few independent releases Sheeran made before he toured with Taylor Swift and became popular.

The earliest Ed Sheeran release available on Spotify is Loose Change which came out in February 2010. It's 8 songs and 31 minutes long, which to me looks like an album but it's apparently considered an EP. And I could rant about how ridiculous it is these days that all albums have to be at least 60 minutes long because nobody has anything better to do with their lives than listen to mediocre music for days on end, but I won't do that here.

Anyway, since Loose Change is still available I'm gonna guess the subject matter will have little to do with 9/11 trutherism. But that would be the best, wouldn't it? Everyone loves Ed Sheeran but later in his career it's discovered he's secretly been a horrible person this whole time? I'm digressing again. I just really don't want to do this. I guess I just need to.

The lead track really wants to be a twee alt rock song at the start, but somebody decided it needed strings. This is a problem I come across in a lot of pop music these days. It's so easy to add a faux-string arrangement to a modern pop song with a synthesizer these days so everyone does it. I don't think there's any world where I'd like "Let It Out" but Sheeran jam-packed it with lots of unneeded production tricks.

In the first few bars of "Homeless" I hit on something. What I really find annoying about Ed Sheeran is how badly he wants to be an R&B artist. This song has tones of being pseudo-reggae and Sheeran practically raps a few of the verses. So maybe it's the discongruity between Sheeran clearly being a ginger nerd and his trying to sell himself as an R&B singer that's really pissing me off. I felt something similar when Taylor Swift remade herself as a pop princess after spending her earlier career as a country singer. It just felt forced and fake. Not that I was ever a Taylor Swift fan, but it still struck me as callous.

It's weird to think of this as an artifact of times long since passed.

Aside: I've checked and apparently "discongruity" is not a word? But that's really the only thing I can think of fitting in that sentence. As The Internet tells me, "When there's congruity, things fit together in a way that makes sense." So when there's the opposite of that, what do you call it?

About halfway through "One Night" suddenly Sheeran has this absurdly pronounced English accent. I know he's from England, but to that point his accent had been pretty flat. In "One Night" his accent is so thick it almost sounds like he's from India. Which is ridiculous and I don't know why it would sound like that. I mean I know India is part of the old British Empire, but that doesn't explain why one of the whitest men on the planet would sound like that.

What's the worst thing a human being can do and call it music? Might it be beatboxing? I think it might be. Parts of "The City" features some guy really badly beatboxing in place of drums. The worst part is "The City" is driven by half-decent acoustic guitar riff that might have worked in an actual rock song. But it's stuck in a stupid Ed Sheeran song.

The EP closes with a dance remix of another song on the EP for some reason. Maybe deep down Sheeran knew like I do that a white guy doing R&B pop music makes no sense, so he but a dance remix on the record in case he needed to quickly change course and become a pop princess.

So one EP in and I'm really bored and am reconsidering doing a deep dive on fucking Ed Sheeran. I'm gonna plow ahead though into his next EP, titled Songs I Wrote With Amy. I'm guessing writing songs with Amy won't improve their quality or how musically interesting they are.

OK, Sheeran's bi-polar accent is really fucking annoying. I don't know if he can help it but when he goes from one verse with no detectable accent to one with a really heavy accent I just want to punch him in the face. So I guess it's not really bothering me that much, since I already want to punch him in the face, but it makes his real accent sound like a super phony put on.

"It's been this way since we were young. We fight and then make up..." Ed, you were 19 when this EP came out. I'm not buying this lyric.

Well, Songs I Wrote With Amy was really short and didn't change my mind. Maybe Live At The Bedford will be different? Maybe Ed Sheeran is a different animal live on stage?

So Live At The Bedford starts off with what was Ed's first smash hit single "The A Team". Seriously, Ed, you can't give a song that name and not expect me to be disappointed when it's not about the adventures of Mr. T and Lieutenant Barclay. In any case the original version of this song was released on Loose Change, but when it became a smash hit it was formally moved to Ed's first real album and deleted from Loose Change, which is stupid. The song is pretty stupid too. I have no idea why it became a hit.

This is the fucking A-Team we want, Ed

Then he plays that stupid song "Homeless" I mentioned before. And this lyric was dumb the first time around but not dumb enough to quote. But now I'm hearing it again and feel kind of insulted by it. "It's not a homeless life for me, it's just that I'm home less than I like to be." Cute lyric, right? No, seriously, fuck you Ed Sheeran. Obviously you're not homeless because you're a famous musician. I get that you might be homesick because you're on tour a lot, but that has nothing to do with being homeless. I really like how he asks the crowd to sing along and they basically ignore him.

Oh shit, now they're doing that fucking beat boxing song again. At least they're using a real drummer instead of some guy's mouth as the primary rhythm section, but there's still a guy making mouth noises in the background.

Before the song "Wake Me Up" Ed relates a story about getting really drunk at this guy's house and writing a song. Apparently even drunk Ed Sheeran loves cheesy-ass love songs, because "Wake Me Up" sounds exactly like the rest of his crap.

"You Need Me, I Don't Need You" closes the EP and for some reason any time Ed wants to sound slightly angry his songs need to have beat boxing. Just ick.

OK, those are the early Ed EPs that are available to me on Spotify. I am not going to take the time to track down the rest of his early junk because fuck that. I'm just going to plug ahead with his stupid albums, the first of which is titled Plus Sign.

Yes, it's titled Plus Sign. Not Plus. When written in a math equation the symbol is used to indicate, "This is where I say 'plus' to mean I'm performing the adding of one number to another." But on it's own it's called a plus sign. So the album is titled Plus Sign.

Or it's titled Ed Sheeran's Punchable Face

Not that there's any point in arguing, because I doubt there's any real reason Ed Sheeran titled his album with a plus sign except to attempt to be cute and meaningful. I'm sure he could give a complex and ultimately douchey answer that it speaks to the character of the music or whatever, but nobody fucking cares.

Plus Sign starts off with that awful song about the A-Team that doesn't mention Mr. T. Ugh... This really is painful for someone like me. I need some edge to the music I listen to and Sheeran offers none. Even a song like "The A-Team" which I think is about a drug addict comes across as twee and saccharine.

Christ, this "Wake Me Up" song really is awful. I think I ignored the lyrics before because the story of how he wrote the song was stupid, but now on their own I can't turn away. Here's a sample: "And I know you love Shrek 'cause we've watched it twelve times. But maybe you're hoping for a fairy tale too. And if your DVD breaks, today you shoulda got a VCR 'cause I never owned a Blu-Ray." FUCKING WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS GARBAGE?!?

"They say I'm up and coming like I'm fucking in an elevator." OK, that's kinda edgy. Still sucks because Ed Sheeran trying to sound gangsta is painfully hilarious. Especially when the next song on the album is titled "Kiss Me" and he asks the song's subject to cuddle him. Seriously, after saying he fucks in elevators Ed comes back with, "Kiss me like you wanna be loved. I'm falling in love. Falling in love."

The album features a hidden track but I'm not sure why. First off all the album was released in multiple "editions" including a deluxe edition which featured extra tracks. Why those tracks couldn't have just been on the standard (cheaper) version isn't clear. But the supposed hidden track is pretty much just another song, except it's not a separate track listing. There's no reason to hide this track except to have a hidden track. It's not like "My Second Album" off STP's Purple in that it's a complete departure, or "Her Majesty" from Abbey Road which was accidentally left on the master tape. I guess it is perfectly fitting for an Ed Sheeran album in being completely pointless.

While we're here we might as well listen to the greatest hidden track of all time

So moving on to Ed's second official album, titled Capital Letter 'X' which I'm assuming he wants pronounced "Times" going on the attempted theme from the first album. The track listing is absurd in that the standard album has 12 songs, but then there's a "deluxe" edition that was released on the same day with an additional 4 songs. Then there's a "deluxe physical" edition with another song on top of that. Then there's the "French collector edition bonus CD" which features 5 more songs. Then the "Wembley Edition" features it's own set of bonus 6 bonus tracks that includes some of the "deluxe" edition songs but a couple not yet seen. Then the Wembley edition also has "digital bonus" tracks, some that are on the other versions but some not.

In short, since 2014 (three years ago as of this writing) this album has been released essentially 6 times and if you want everything released under the Capital Letter 'X' banner you pretty much have to buy all of them. To be fair that's not Ed's fault, but it pisses me off. At least the standard edition of Capital Letter 'X' is "only" 50 minutes long.

Ed Sheeran really stretches his limits by writing a love song with the lyric "You are the only one." I'm just blown away by his way with words sometimes. I think in "I'm A Mess" he asks me to put my faith in his stomach. Seeing as how he loves to sing about being drunk I think not.

"Sing" is a real disaster where Ed decides he's gonna sing falsetto, because that's what all high tenors not named Robert Plant should be doing. In case it's not clear I'm being sarcastic because it sounds fucking awful. Notable on this track is the writing, vocal, and producing contributions from Pharrell Williams. Not that I care, but it's notable. If I ever have to listen to more crap from Pharrell Williams I'll remember this.

OK, credit where due... I appreciate an artist who takes chances and grows in new directions. It's admirable for Sheeran to be a wispy ginger boy and sing so much hip-hop inspired music. But Capital Letter 'X' sure is stuffed really hard with boring over-produced hip hop. Not that I miss his whiny folk rock, or his attempts to beat box.

The first minute of "Tenerife Sea" is actually pretty good. I'm trying to put it into words what it reminds me of... maybe a twee acoustic love song by Simon and Garfunkel. It could work for Ed Sheeran if he just went with it. But he can't just leave it be, or maybe his producers can't, so the rest of the song is ruined by modern pop production shit. And the lyrics are just as lame as any other Ed song. Can you believe it? He's so in love. So in love. So in love. So in love.

I remember when I listened to The Streets A Grand Don't Come for Free that the dude's heavy English accent was at first distracting, but eventually it worked because the album was about some dude trying to deal with largely trivial stuff. He wasn't trying to be a super tough gangster, or maybe he was but it was so goofy it felt like an intentional farce. When Ed Sheeran tries to rap it sounds like a pathetic attempt to be a badass, and it's all about how he's a skinny ginger white boy with a thick English accent who typically writes boring generic poppy love songs.

"Thinking Out Loud" almost has a chance to become something of an R&B standard, but Ed should have given it to an artist who has an ounce of soul. It's like how Mark Knopfler wrote "Private Dancer" for Dire Straits' Love Over Gold album only to realize he really couldn't do the song justice, so he gave it to Tina Turner who fucking killed it. I'm not sure who specifically should have sung "Thinking Out Loud" because I don't know all the great R&B singers today, but 20 or 30 or 40 years ago... I don't know. It's an OK song, and I should give credit to Ed Sheeran for writing a potential standard.

Anyway so I give Ed credit for expanding his horizons a bit on Capital Letter 'X'. Still didn't like the music really at all. Nothing left to do but listen to Ed's most recent release, and he's really being original by titling this one Divide.

Yes, he actually titled it Divide. There's no joke I can really make when the damn word is written right across the face of the album. He probably anticipated a snarky reviewer like me would come along and make fun of his shitty albums being titled with symbols and wrote out the name of this one to ruin the joke. Like he ruins everything else. Or he realized that if he only put an obelis on the cover most rubes would have no idea what that meant. Not even mathematicians use an obelis to indicate division these days.

Right away I notice that the album exists is 2 formats, one standard with 12 tracks and another "deluxe" with 16. In fact thus far Ed Sheeran's catalog of 3 albums have all featured 12 songs, though you can pay an extra few dollars for 4 more. How exactly does Ed Sheeran construct his albums? It looks to me like he says, "OK, I've got 16 songs. These are good enough to release on their own as singles, these are OK to be filler on an album, and these are kinda shit so I'll put them on the 'deluxe' edition to entice completists to pay me extra money." Whatever the case it's pretty clear that Ed Sheeran doesn't view his albums as complete artistic statements unto themselves and more a collection of songs he happened to make in a given time period, which to me is a real shame.

"Eraser" again starts with what I probably wouldn't mind Ed Sheeran doing for the rest of his life- a solid acoustic guitar riff. It could have been part of an OK rocker, but no. It's just another shitty hip-hop track with Ed sounding completely out of his element rapping. I'm not sure what Ed thought he was gonna accomplish with "Drive". Maybe it was supposed to be reminiscent of U2's Joshua Tree, but it sounds way too much like a generic pop-princess tune. Ed's falsetto shrieking certainly doesn't help the tough-guy cred he tries to generate with rapping.

OK, fine. I'll give Ed "Shape Of You." It's not a type of song that I would ever like. In fact I kinda hate it. But with all the crap Ed Sheeran has foisted upon the world it's pretty goddamn impressive he composed such a tight dance track. Then again there are 5 other people given writing credits, which tends to happen a lot nowadays with major hits. So is Ed Sheeran really a musical genius for having written "Shape Of You?" I don't really have an answer, because I don't know who is actually responsible for what makes the track work. I do like the one reviewer who commented that "Shape Of You" is the first song that convincingly makes the case that Ed Sheeran has had sex.

Then "Perfect" comes on and it makes me assume Ed Sheeran has never touched a woman in his life. Interestingly Sheeran is the only listed writer on "Perfect." "Galway Girl" meanwhile has TEN listed writers, and was clearly produced to be a hit single in Ireland, with its references to pubs and its faux-Celtic string overdubs. It would have been great if the Irish had dismissed it as a cheap callous impersonation of their culture but unfortunately it debuted No. 1 on the Irish charts. Sigh...

So Ed has this song called "What Do I Know?" that could be called, "Hey, I'm A Privileged A-hole!" It's one of those songs where the singer tries to pass themselves off as cool and carefree while also having the solution to all the world's problems. It's hard to think of a song with this message that doesn't come across as naive and pretentious. Consider the lyrics:

"I'm just a boy with a one-man show
No university, no degree, but lord knows
Everybody's talking 'bout exponential growth
And the stock market crashing in their portfolios
While I'll be sitting here with a song that I wrote
Sing, love could change the world in a moment
But what do I know?"

You know what, Ed? Not all of us can be lucky enough to be "discovered" by Jaime Foxx or become friends with Taylor Swift. Some of us actually have to go to university to get degrees so we can work our asses off for decades trying to repay the debts we built up just to be acceptable in a professional field only to one day see all of our savings disappear because of greedy assholes manipulating the stock market... But as long as you're sitting on your ass and able to right a song I guess love really can change the world in a moment. What makes it worse is supposedly Ed wrote this song in like 5 minutes just to prove he could to some record producer. So it's not only naive, it's flippant, it's dismissive.

So that's it. I'm done with this guy. I really can't stand his voice or his musical inspirations or what he's trying to do in his career. I understand why a couple of his songs became massive hit singles, but his albums are stuffed with useless repetitive junk. And I really do hate his haircut. Say what you will about Robert Plant's fabulous 80s coif...

At the very least he he spent hours in front of the mirror and hundreds of dollars in product to style his hair. He didn't do all that to make it look like he didn't style his hair.

OK, I've obsessed over something I hate way too long. But at least it got me writing again.