Key Sentence:
- When Ed Sheeran wrapped up the final date of his record-breaking Divide tour in 2019, he thought his career might be over.
“I think so,” he told GQ earlier this year. “It was the top of the mountain, and I will never do that again. I think everything will come down from here. The end of this tour hit me. Settling and painting in Suffolk, he became the proud father of a little girl, Lyra, amid a pandemic.
For months, the singer – one of the best-selling artists in the world – didn’t even pick up a guitar. “I said to myself, ‘That’s me, that’s me, I’m just going to be a dad, I’m not going to make music anymore,'” he told Sirius XM Radio.
“Suddenly, I said to myself, ‘It’s more important for my daughter to grow up knowing. That her parents have a work ethic and that her parents love to work hard and create and enjoy what they do,'” she said. “And looking at that rather than seeing your father technically unemployed.
So here we are with Ed Sheeran’s fourth solo album called =(Equals). It arrives at the busiest time for a new album in years — a week before Abba’s unexpected return. Two weeks before the latest version of Taylor Swift’s Red, and three weeks before Adele’s “Divorce Album,” January 1.
However, Sheeran had the edge over the competition.
The first two singles from = (Bad Habits and Shivers) spent a total of 15 weeks at number one in the summer. And the latter proves that the star hasn’t lost her knack for writing slick, catchy pop hooks. The rest of the album is polished, balancing Sheeran’s tireless commercial instincts with more introspective emotional moments. As the title implies, the 30-year-old’s lyrical concern is balance in his personal life. The first words he sang were: “I grew up / I’ve become a father / Everything has changed / But somehow I’m still the same.
Simplicity is never far from the surface, and most of the 14 songs are address to his wife, Cherry Seaborn. Whom he first met at school. “The biggest thing I ever accomplished was four little words on one knee,” she recalls First Times, the first of many subtle ballads about their relationship. “You said, ‘baby, are you kidding me?” “And I just said, “Please.”
You have the feeling that Seaborn might blush from some of his more impactful love cries. “I’ve never kissed a mouth that tastes like yours,” he said crazily to Shivers. What’s worse is that he remembers himself “rushing to the booth in Tokyo” and “making love in the sky” on the medium-tempo song TMI Collide.
He hits the mark in The Joker And The Queen, an exquisite cri d’amour in which Sheeran sings in muffled amazement at Seaborn’s decision to contact him. When he may have the choice of “a thousand kings.” Smeared with a layer of transparent string. It’s sure to be a wedding kit, just like the previous stellar hit, Thinking Out Loud and Perfect.