Ed Sheeran is all lost at sea on his fifth album. On defiant opening track Boat, he sounds broken but brave - "The waves won't break my boat." On Salt Water, he avers "It’s ok to run from all this pain .. . ." Later, he sings, "I’ve been depressed since you left, Tried to fill the hole with wine." Subtract may follow the same math pop title motif of his first records, but this is not the sound of Sheeran, the everyman who has, well, divided and conquered the globe with an acoustic guitar and a nice guy persona.
It’s dark, it’s stark and at times deeply moving. It was written in hugely challenging circumstances as his wife Cherry Seaborn was diagnosed with cancer while she was pregnant in 2021 and his close friend, music producer Jamal Edwards, died.
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Add all that sorrow and upheaval to the fact that Sheeran has to look over his shoulder every time he writes a damn song for fear somebody might sue him and being a normal joe superstar has become a very hard job indeed. Such was Sheeran’s anger at his most recent copyright trial, that he vowed he would quit music altogether if he lost. Happily, he won - a victory not just for him but for the actual art of song writing.
Whether he was serious about hanging up his Lowden guitar or not, as the young Michael Jackson once sang, "You can’t win, You can’t break even, And you can’t get out of the game."
Subtract was never going to be a grinding F U to the music industry and the sheer injustice of life in general a la Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. He may be seeking shelter from the storm, but it’s not quite Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks either but these desolate, largely acoustic verses of angst have more in common with Damien Rice and Ben Howard than the Sheeran of anthemic love songs and crossover Spotty playlists.
Heat-seeking melodies and heart-tugging turns of phrase dominate; peals of pedal steel and haunting string arrangements enrich the sound and Sheeran’s voice has never sounded better and more committed to the material. Thankfully, he leaves "the rapping to the brothers."
There is also plenty here (Eyes Closed, Life Goes On) that will please the Ed massive, the kind of people who like to get engaged on stage in front of 80,000 people. Co-written and produced by Aaron Dessner of strangely eulogised US indie act The National and featuring musicians of such high calibre as Thomas Bartlett, Lisa Hannigan and Rob Moose, any risk taking doesn’t sound remotely calculated.
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The tracks of his tears can be felt on the plaintive early Van-isms of Life Goes On, while the simple music box tinkle of Colourblind and windswept piano ballad Borderline signal a real maturing of song writing skills. When he does eh, rock out on Curtains, it’s a joy - all jagged guitars, a hooky lyric and a marvellous clatter of drums. Elsewhere, the charmingly perky Dusty pivots on the mother of all chord changes and is the best thing here.
Vega, a reference to the star and not Alan or Suzanne, is particularly fine as Ed moves between a keening falsetto and a seasoned vocal as a tasteful string arrangement that echoes Taylor Swift’s recent albums Folklore and Evermore moves like a ghost in the background. Sycamore hits a similar vein of beautiful acoustic melancholia and features the album’s starkest lyric about the day Ed and Cherry were told of her cancer diagnosis. It is quite a moment on an album full of tear duct bothering moments.
Irish folk song The Hills of Aberfeldy, co-written with Foy Vance, goes a long way in banishing memories of the Celtic codology of Galway Girl. It serves as a poignant and optimistic closer to an album that finds Sheeran broken but unbowed. Subtract is all about righting the ship and going back to the start to chart a steady course to a new horizon. The stoniest of hearts may very well crack.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
