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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
We have poured our lives into the small oblong devices that we neurotically carry wherever we go, and which we insist on calling telephones even though many of us dislike using them for actual phone conversations.
Ed Sheeran ditched his smartphone in 2015, but the everyman superstar gets it. Things and feelings are intermingled in his songs. They show how objects condition our emotional lives — none more so than the portable computer whose multiple uses include listening to music by the likes of Sheeran.
In “Small Bump”, from his 2011 debut Plus, he took the part of an expectant father moved to wonderment by a scan of the unborn baby. His 2015 hit “Photograph” treats a photo of a couple as a token of the best they could be amid the flaws of real life. And the 2017 chart-topper “Shape of You” hinges on the memory of a lover imprinted in the bed from the night before.
Sheeran’s new album Play contains a fresh example. “Old Phone” depicts the onrush of memories triggered by the rediscovery of texts from vanished friends and exes in an old phone (perhaps the one consigned to a drawer in 2015). A boom-chicka-boom drumbeat neatly evokes the trip into the past, as the singer’s sweetly plaintive voice presses the right emotional buttons. The secret of his success is the ability to bring a human touch to the machinery of chart pop.
His eighth studio album marks a return to “big pop”, in Sheeran’s description, following 2023’s restrained Autumn Variations. It shows a sure touch for assimilating different styles (another reason for his success). “Sapphire” is an engagingly upbeat collaboration with Indian singer Arijit Singh, while “Azizam” smoothly fuses western and Persian pop. Fred Again features on the emotive electronic pop of “Don’t Look Down”.
Sheeran’s Achilles heel is the mawkishness that results when he tries too strenuously to invest songs with feelings. In “Camera”, he vows to remember a vision of his lover forever, without need for a camera. The result is overcooked balladry; an instance when both human touch and sure touch desert him.
★★★☆☆
‘Play’ is released by Gingerbread Man/Atlantic Records