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Ed Sheeran now has two main reasons to be having a good week: he has just released his new long-awaited album ‘Subtract’ after winning a copyright infringement trial involving his hit ‘Thinking Out Loud’ and Martin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’. And here goes a third one: his new release has just leaped to the No.1 position in iTunes in the U.S. and other 36 countries.

However, these past few months have not been the best for Sheeran, who aims to bring us a chiaroscuro narrative of his experiences in what he intends to be his saddest album.

Life Lessons Behind ‘Subtract’

Subtract was the last of the basic mathematical operations left for Ed Sheeran to title an album that is undoubtedly shaping up to be the most painful of his entire career. In recent years, life has hit the Halifax singer-songwriter hard. He has lost several of his friends and his partner, pregnant with their second daughter, was diagnosed with an inoperable tumor until she gave birth. Dealing with death, illness and uncertainty would have a great impact on anyone and of course on the musician, who has poured all these experiences into ‘Subtract’.

«This album is about grief, fear and depression», as the artist himself acknowledges in this interview with LOS40: «I feel that life always presents us with small challenges and last year we faced a big one, but we overcame them as a family», he explains.

‘Boat’ is the track that opens the album. In his lyrics and video, Sheeran defines very well how his world has been until recently: living at the mercy of the waves of a raging sea where you have no control over anything that happens in your life. And, in general, that feeling of embracing chaos is what runs throughout the album.

On ‘Salt Water’ he again has the sea in the background. «I’m free in the salt water, I embrace the depths and let it all go, it was just a dream,» he sings. The first single from the album was ‘Eyes Closed’, which you should already know well and probably the most moving song on the album.

The melancholy continues to ooze as the album progresses and Ed wonders on ‘Life Goes On’ how it’s possible to go on with life when someone close to you is gone. In songs like ‘Dusty’ we already feel some light in the composition and also the sonority and arrangements of the song, somewhat more lucid than the previous ones: «Yesterday was a long night / But I have the feeling that the future’s so bright«, sings Sheeran in this track.

In ‘End of Youth’, the artist wonders if: Is this the end of our youth when pain begins to take over? Meanwhile, ‘Colourblind‘ has a beautiful melody that rocks the lyrics of the song, perhaps a point of color and brightness in the album. It is followed by ‘Curtains’, which is much more guitar-heavy and canned, but not only that, in this track, Sheeran allows himself to come out of his darkness, he has already suffered too much and so he expresses it in his lyrics: «Can you pull the curtains / Let me see the sun / I think I’ve come out of my hiding place». But these glimpses soon come to an end. She continues the album with ‘Borderline’ or ‘Spark‘, songs in which she is again on the edge of the abyss.

In the beautifu ‘Vega’, Sheeran finds some glimmer of hope: «I’m trying to keep it all together / One door closes and one opens / I have to keep the focus / If we believe, then everything will get better», sings the Briton. Feelings are on full display on Sycamore, Sheeran’s most explicit track about his wife’s ailment while pregnant with their little girl. Love makes its way in No Strings and The Hills of Aberfeldy, in which the artist manages to reconcile with the world

In the deluxe version of Subtract we also find 4 bonus tracks in which the artist has done his best in terms of composition. There is a lot of truth and a lot of regret in this album, perhaps because pain always inspires more than happy moments. Sheeran manages to shake us with every lyric and every melody of this work for which he has had an exceptional collaborator: Aaron Dessner, from The National, a true craftsman of lyrics and sad melodies.

Throughout Subtract, Sheeran is vulnerable, sharp, delivered to chaos or anxiety, but there are also moments when he tries to get afloat, they are the least, but they manage to shine among so much darkness.

You can read the Spanish version of this article by Selene Moral here: “Cuando la vida te golpea: Ed Sheeran publica Subtract (-), su disco más triste hasta la fecha”.