"A Team" by Ed Sheeran

Song 2:

“A Team” by Ed Sheeran

Peak: 16

Year: 2013

Year End Position: NA

Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/5

Chronological Songs by Artist: 1/5

Video?: Yes

Wikipedia?:  Yes:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A_Team_(song)

Spotify?:  Yes

Lyrics:  http://genius.com/Ed-sheeran-the-a-team-lyrics

Remember yesterday how I said that it was strange that “A Bay Bay” was a strange place to start off because “A” is usually an article, and therefore not counted in alphabetizing.  Well, today we have a perfect example where the article does make a difference.  The actual title of today’s entry is “The A Team”, but we lop off the “The” when alphabetizing.  Now that the grammar lesson is out of the way, we can get into the song.

For those of you that skew older, there was another song that hit the top 40 in the 60s called “The A Team” by Barry Sadler.  He’ll come up later with another song called “The Ballad of the Green Berets”.  Unfortunately for him, that song only hit #28, so it missed the cutoff for this blog.  There was also a hit TV show in the 80s called the “A Team”.  It had a cool theme song, but this particular Ed Sheeran song has nothing to do with either Barry Sadler or Mr. T.

This song marks the first of five songs that we will get to on this blog from Ed Sheeran.  Not only is this the first song we get to in alphabetical order, it is also his first top 20 hit in the USA in chronological order.  Ed, as you may know, is from England and bares a passing resemblance to Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley in all the Harry Potter movies.  I have a pet theory that acts from Europe typically hit it big over there well before they do in the States.  Ed Sheeran is a textbook example of that.  This particular song was a hit in England in 2011.  It wasn’t until 2013 that the song reached the charts in the US.

It had been a while since I last heard “The A Team”, and my memory was a little foggy about what the song was about.  I was surprised when I read the lyrics just how dark this song is.  For those that don’t remember (as I didn’t), the song is about a prostitute that turns tricks to earn money to support her crack cocaine addiction.  My interpretation of the song is that the woman in the song dies at the end.  This seems pretty dark for an introductory song by an artist, but not totally uncommon.  Suzanne Vega’s first song “Luka” was about child abuse, and Tracy Chapman’s first song “Fast Car” is about alcoholism.  Another thing those songs have in common is that they are all relatively simply arranged.  This song essentially is just Ed with an acoustic guitar.

I’ve read that the motivation for the title is that Ed wanted to put a positive spin on what is obviously a depressing song based on the lyrics.  That seems reasonable to me.  My favorite theory about the title is that crack is listed as a Class A drug in England, so she’s on the “A Team” because she uses them.  That’s a little dark, but I like that turn of phrase.

This song also marked the first Grammy nomination for Ed Sheeran.  “The A Team” was nominated in 2013 for Song of the Year (The songwriting Grammy), which it eventually lost to “We Are Young” by Fun.  In what I can only think of as some sort of byzantine logic, Ed was nominated for a second Grammy award the following year for “Best New Artist”.  How someone can be classified as a New Artist when they were already nominated for a major award the year before escapes me.  Then again, I don’t have a hand in nominating anyone, so I obviously don’t understand the inner workings of the process.  Either way, Ed was given the opportunity to lose for two consecutive years which he did as he lost to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.  He did manage to score an opening act spot on the Taylor Swift “Red” tour around that same time, and as evidence by the 4 other songs we’ll get to from Ed, he recovered pretty well.

My personal take on this song is that the more I listen to it, the more I appreciate the writing.  The imagery of the lyrics is quite good.  Lines like “..her face seems slowly sinking / wasting / crumbling like pastries” and “The worst things come free to us” are particularly heartbreaking and sad. 

The video of the song essentially follows the storyline of the song.  A sad, young girl begs for money and eventually turns to prostitution and sleeps with a man so that she can get money to buy crack cocaine.  The video ends with her smoking it and falling backwards.  It’s open to interpretation if she dies or not (I think she does).

All in all, I like songs like this.  They give the charts flavor in that they take on topics that aren’t typically heard on the pop charts.  Not every song needs to be about love or heartbreak, and that’s what makes this song stand out to me.  Good job, Ed.