28 February 2013
We’ve not had Ed Sheeran at number one yet—that pleasure is still a year away—but ‘Let Her Go’ can serve as our entrée to Ed-ism. Passenger’s chart-topping profile in early 2013 came in great part from supporting Sheeran on his Irish tour that January. So, there’s a good deal of similar baggy-jumper sensitive-busker folk-pop content here, and if you’re an Ed Sheeran shopper then for you that’s happy days.
For the rest of us, ‘Let Her Go’ is not just Ed Sheeran, but bad Ed Sheeran. Mike Rosenberg’s falsetto quacking is a bizarre singing style that grates my teeth in a way nothing else has since James Blunt’s whinnying on ‘You’re Beautiful’. It also shares that song’s creepily possessive male-privilege slant towards women; maybe you didn’t “let her go” but instead she chose to leave your sorry ass post-haste with no forwarding address. Add to that the rinky-dink piano intro, and the whole effect is also akin to the infantilising purée of Owl City’s ‘Fireflies’. Again, for some people these are their Spotify playlists and for the rest of us they’re our first-date dealbreakers. And the video (below) of concert set-up and footage leans into my old ’00s bugbear of performative authenticity. Stop the record, I want to get off.
