30 October 2014
Married people: is Ed Sheeran part of your story? Perhaps one of his songs accompanied your proposal; Sheeran himself talks about how seven people proposed to their partners during one of his concerts, and how popping the question is now a regular occurrence during live performances of ‘Thinking Out Loud’. Or maybe you first-danced to him; the video for ‘Thinking Out Loud’ is pretty much a showcase for this track choice. And I suppose we can’t rule out you going the whole hog and dropping ‘Thinking Out Loud’ in the honeymoon suite as you, um, consummate.
Getting it on is certainly part of the ‘Thinking Out Loud’ story. Having previously served karma on Robin Thicke and Pharrell for ‘Blurred Lines’, lawyers for various owners of Marvin Gaye’s catalogue then ordered in pizza again and got to work on claiming Sheeran’s song infringed the copyright of ‘Let’s Get It On’. As with the ‘Blurred Lines’ case, the logic here seemed to relate more to “vibes” than a blatant lift. You can certainly catch the flavour of ‘Let’s Get It On’ in the chord sequence and arrangement of the chorus if you look for it, but eventually the case didn’t go the way of the ‘Blurred Lines’ precedent. A cleared Sheeran afterwards noted that the “common building blocks” of a limited number of chords and a certain genre of music will invariably produce songs that sound similar.
Suffice it to say, the song itself hardly lives up to its subsequent drama-by-association of marriage proposals and court cases. As all this question-popping and first-dancing suggests, ‘Thinking Out Loud’ is a youthful and guileless folk-pop slow-set number that sits upstream from the latter-day Westlife ballad like ‘Tonight’ and its life-sentence conjugal bliss. To put it in terms you wedded couples may recognise, ‘Thinking Out Loud’ is the proposal and first dance, while Westlife are the anniversary where you lastminute-dot-com remember to pick up flowers at the petrol station on your way home.
I feel bad associating Ed Sheeran and ‘Thinking Out Loud’ with the likes of Westlife. The singer is more personable, the song is more engaging, plus there’s slightly more craft and colour here than in your typical ’00s bootcut balladry. Still, there’s a shared first principle—a common building block—of love as recognisably quotidian and banal: no heartache, risk, or shirt-rending power-ballad tropes, but more emphasis on relationships as simpering, maudlin, performative dependency. It’s love without the romance. (I heard part of a podcast episode once about love, so I know what I’m talking about.)
There are other Ed Sheeran chart-toppers to come, some of which wallow more in the unappealing aspects of Ed-ism. We’ll get to those. By comparison, ‘Thinking Out Loud’ is merely happily comfortable in being surprise-free slow-dance fare, when my own preference is for a bit of electricity and excitement. But hey, if this is what fires you up into dropping the knee and shoving the rock at your partner while others do likewise and thousands look on, all distracting from a gigging musician trying to do their job, good luck to you.
