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.
