Ed Sheeran may have taken a break from the mathematical symbol titles, but fans can be reassured his musical formula remains the same on Autumn Variations. The affable “bloke in a T-shirt” sticks to the busker’n’beats style that’s made him the best-selling male artist of the past decade. That said, as its end-of-year title implies, Autumn Variations finds Sheeran in mellow, misty-eyed mode, rather than the cringier dancefloor zone of Collaborations.
Sheeran’s seventh studio album was, he says, loosely inspired by the composer Edward Elgar, whose 1899 Enigma Variations – containing his famous “Nimrod” melody – featured 14 sketches of his wife, friends and colleagues. Rather like Sheeran, Elgar was treated sniffily by critics in the 1920s. They regarded his decorative themes and emotional restraint as stuffily Victorian and jingoistic, particularly when set against the modernist innovations of younger composers tackling life’s bleak realities in the wake of the First World War. In 1932, conductor Constant Lambert lamented “an almost intolerable air of smugness, self-assurance and autocratic benevolence” in Elgar’s music.
Modern critics can feel the same about Sheeran, who freely confesses to writing “cheesy” ballads because they hit home. They both came from relatively humble beginnings, later rising to become part of “the establishment” and all its pomp and circumstance, and both explore their tender, youthful connections to the English landscape. Elgar preferred the north to the bustling city of London, while Sheeran harks back to Framlingham’s ruined “Castle on the Hill” and his pals living “normal” lives. The best song on Autumn Variations is “England”, on which a stuttering electric guitar gives a heartfelt pulse to his tribute to a country of “grass and pebbles”, and “pubs with flags” offering “flexible working hours”.
“I find this country of mine gets a bad reputation for being cold and grey,” sings Sheeran, with no pretensions at poetry, before noting that if you take a walk here you’ll “feel fine”. You don’t come to this artist for insight, but for normality and mateyness. On “England”, Sheeran all but hands you a coat and a fiver for the chippy.
While Elgar refused to explain the “enigma” at the heart of his variations, warning “its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed”, Sheeran has been more open about his recent emotional struggles. Interviewed by Rolling Stone earlier this year, he spoke of the depression that has dogged him since primary school and how it had been triggered by his wife’s recent health scare and the sudden death of his best friend, Jamal Edwards.
