Review of a song

Ed Sheeran - Afire Love

Ed Sheeran (Edward Christopher) is an English singer-songwriter who was born 17 February 1991 in Hebden Bridge. He was raised in Framingham, Suffolk, but he moved to London in 2008 to pursue a musical career. With such high talent, Sheeran began music recording in 2005, and released his first independent EP, The Orange Room EP. Between the years of 2005-2010, Ed had played 312 gigs, mainly in small venues. In January of 2011, Sheeran released his independent EP, No.5 Collaborations Project, featuring appearances by grime artists including Wiley, JME, Devlin, Sway and Ghetts. With this EP, Sheeran gained attention for reaching number 2 in the iTunes chart without any promotion or label, selling over 7,000 copies in its first week. Since then, His career has hit the roof with his to smash-hit albums '+' and 'x'.

'The A Team', his 2011 debut single, kicked started his successful career when it entered the UK Singles Charts at a astonishing number 3.

Since his career starts, Sheeran has been nominated for 49 awards but sadly only won 12.

 

 

 

This week I will be reviewing the song off Ed Sheeran's new, sensational album, Multiple. In my opinion, this is the most heartfelt track on the album. Sheeran's music can be categories within the genres of pop, R&B, alternative hip-hop, fold and acoustic. The album has made it possible for Sheeran to go on to be described as "gently pushing the boundaries and maturing noticeable". 

 

This specific song from the album is about Sheeran heartbreakingly opening up about his grandfather's battle with Alzheimer's disease and its rippling effect on his family and grandmother. Through this song, we can understand the true heartache of watching and helping someone to this terrible disease. In the bridge of the song, Sheeran sings the lyrics "My father told me, 'Son, it's not his fault he doesn't know your face' / You're not the only one," before telling us about his grandparents true love for each other which has since been scrambled by the tragedy of memory loss. Not only does it give us his own, personal side of these events, it also gives us his grandmothers recognition of what his grandfather use to be like. To me, that is what makes this song so touching. 

 

Set to a smooth, mesmerising beat that just emphasizes the song's lyrical feeling of sadness, "Afire Love" also touches on the flip side of a tragic death. This song has clearly been thought about with high effort. The clever use of violin adds to the 'depressing' tone of the song, which clearly fits the lyrics perfectly.

 

The reason is chose this song because I, and so many others, can highly relate to this song as this specific disease as if affects so many people within the world. The album on a whole, in my opinion, is highly relatable which attracts a target audience of all kinds. 'Afire Love' doesn't just have one specific group that it targets. The audience of this song could be pretty much anyone. This is one of the main reason that I think this song is such a powerful song. Not many songs can have an audience as big with such an affect on said audience.