Ed Sheeran - Autumn Variations

White vinyl

Ed Sheeran settles in for Autumn Variations

Album is a first release through his own label

Ed Sheeran's latest project, Autumn Variations, is here. The album, produced by Aaron Dessner, features 14 new tracks by the English pop star. Notably, it's his first independent release on his own Gingerbread Man Records, and Sheeran says they'll be no promotional singles and music videos for the project.

“Last autumn, I found that my friends and I were going through so many life changes. After the heat of the summer, everything either calmed, settled, fell apart, came to a head or imploded,” says Sheeran.

“When I went through a difficult time at the start of last year, writing songs helped me understand my feelings and come to terms with what was going on, and when I learned about my friend’s different situations, I wrote songs, some from their perspectives, some from mine, to capture how they and I viewed the world at that time. There were highs of falling in love and new friendships among lows of heartbreak, depression, loneliness and confusion.”

“My dad and brother told me about a composer called Elgar, who composed ‘Enigma Variations’, where each of the 14 compositions were about a different one of his friends. This is what inspired me to make this album. When I recorded Subtract with Aaron Dessner, we clicked immediately. We wrote and recorded non-stop and this album was born out of that partnership. I feel he has captured the feeling of autumn so wonderfully in his sonics and I hope everyone loves it as much as I do.”

"Each record before I've done, like, all the big going in and doing all these radio interviews, and going on the late-night shows, and doing, doing all this stuff. And this record, there's not even a single for it. There's not, there's not a music video. I'm just putting it out," Sheeran said of his new strategy in an interview with CBS Mornings that aired the day the set dropped.

The 32-year-old shared that his motivations for forgoing the typical album release model stems from being a big-budget pop star for most of his career. "I wanna put out an independent record," he explained. "And also, like, I've had 12, 13 years of the, being a pop star, and having the pressure of it has to sell this week one, you have to have this hit single, you have to have this. And part of me goes, ‘Why?'"

Sheeran further stated that going the independent route alleviates him of the typical major-label pressure. Of the music industry, the "Magical" singer noted that "everything has to be the biggest and best every time, and then better the next time. I think that's part of the independent thing, that takes away the pressure. There are no expectations because there's no company. You have to live with it. You have to be like, ‘I don't care what people think.'"

Autumn Variations also marks Sheeran's first record to evoke the feeling of a specific season, inspired in part by the cozy days he's spent at home with wife Cherry Seaborn and their two daughters. "Me and Cherry cook a lot and we always put on the same sort of records, Norah Jones' Come Away With Me or Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams," he recalled. "I was always like, ‘I don't have a record like this, that's just one producer, one mood, one feel.' So that was very much wanting to go in and create an autumnal feeling or 14 stories about my friends."

 

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