Subtraction

“It looks like I’m not having to retire from my day job after all,” ED SHEERAN told reporters Thursday afternoon outside the New York courthouse where a jury had just cleared him of the accusation he'd plagiarized MARVIN GAYE. Sheeran was jokingly referencing his own threat, blurted out in anger from the witness stand three days earlier, that if he lost the case, “I’m done, I’m stopping.” He didn’t want to keep making music if every song he wrote was going to be an invitation to legal retribution. Understandable, especially coming from a songwriter who’d been through the same legal wringer before. Writing songs with the wrong chord progression, or insufficiently original syncopation, shouldn’t be up there with cheating on your taxes or stealing Sudafed in the eyes of the law. We needn’t, and shouldn’t, have chord progression police.

But Sheeran proved to be a model defendant and I think, therefore, we did need to have this exact trial. This puts me at odds not only with Sheeran but with most of the music industry and most of the legal analysts who’ve been insisting that the case, brought by the family of Gaye’s collaborator ED TOWNSEND, should never have gone to trial and could have upended the recording and publishing businesses if the plaintiffs had prevailed. They said Sheeran was targeted for nothing more than being a working songwriter and musician, and that his song “THINKING OUT LOUD” sounded nothing like Gaye’s “LET’S GET IT ON” anyway.

They were partly right about the first half of that and partly wrong about the second half. Here’s ADAM NEELY, a jazz musician and one of the internet’s more astute musicologists, on the similarities between the songs: “The drum grooves are identical, the bass line is the same, the chord progressions are nearly identical, the harmonic rhythm is the same and the melodies are phrased very similarly—they both backphrase off of beat one, they emphasize the third degree of the scale and resolve to the first degree of the scale.” They kind of do, in other words, sound alike. But that should never have been the question. The question should have been: So what?

Here’s Neely again: “The practice of copying bass lines from earlier work to create new compositions is the very foundation of how Western music was written, how it was taught and how it was developed for the past several hundred years.” Within musical styles ranging from Renaissance-era church music to 20th- and 21st-century pop soul balladry, songs sound like each other not only because of influence and coincidence, but because of the very idea of style. If you don’t syncopate the melody in a certain way, you aren’t going to have a pop soul ballad at all. Songwriters copy because copying is one of the ways songwriting works.

That’s not exactly how the argument came out at trial, but it did come out, and Ed Sheeran seems to have done so more effectively than any of the other pop and rock stars who’ve been in similar situations in recent years, from ROBIN THICKE and PHARRELL to LED ZEPPELIN to KATY PERRY. For starters, Sheeran showed up in court every day. He was *present*. He had a story to tell.

He testified persuasively, passionately and articulately, often with guitar in hand. He talked about influence (it wasn’t Marvin Gaye in this case, he insisted, it was VAN MORRISON). He strummed the guitar and sang, from the witness stand, to demonstrate how so many of our favorite songs use the same chords in the same sequence. He explained how he and his fellow songwriters use those generic chords as building blocks for their non-generic art. He literally told the jury, “Most pop songs can fit over most pop songs.” He was funny sometimes, and angry other times, describing why he didn’t want to be there, and what it meant that he was there. It was a master class in both process and emotion.

It was easy to walk away from it thinking that Sheeran was testifying not only to the panel of jurors sitting in front of him, but to all of us: to all the fans and gawkers following Ed Sheeran songwriting court as closely as they’d followed GWYNETH PALTROW skiing court, to all the future plagiarism plaintiffs and all the future judges who’ll be assigned their cases, to everyone in the business wondering how to move beyond this seemingly endless cycle of lawsuits, to KATHRYN GRIFFIN TOWNSEND, who helped bring the suit on behalf of her late father’s legacy. She and Sheeran hugged and shared some words after the verdict was read, and she later told reporters, “If we had been able to just talk, we wouldn’t be here today.” And maybe now that we’ve all had this talk, we won’t have to be here tomorrow.

Addition

Since he doesn’t have to stop after all, Sheeran is free to promote his fifth album, SUBTRACT, which arrived at midnight ET, less than eight hours after the verdict was read. (Best album promo campaign ever?) It’s a deeply emotional album, created in the midst of a series of dark events in Sheeran’s life: the death of his best friend, British music media mogul Jamal Edwards; his wife’s cancer diagnosis; his own spiraling depression, and, not coincidentally, the shadow of both of his plagiarism trials. The songwriting was part of his therapy, and he had a new collaborator, Aaron Dessner, who co-wrote and produced most of the album and told Sheeran he “would love to hear him in a more vulnerable, more sort of elemental way.” An ”exposed-nerve feel... recurs throughout,” Maura Johnston writes in Rolling Stone, under a headline that declares, “Ed Sheeran Battles Depression And Wins.” USA Today’s Melissa Ruggieri says Sheeran “drowns in grief, then shoots up for air.”

Also today: New music from Billy Woods & Kenny Segal, IDK, Conway the Machine, Fred Again & Brian Eno, Peter One, Jidenna, Destroy Lonely, Atmosphere, OhGeesy, Jeleel!, Justin Moore, Megan Moroney, the late Olivia Newton-John (duets collection including a version of “Jolene” recorded shortly before her death, with Dolly Parton), the Lemon Twigs, Nanna (solo debut from Of Monsters and Men singer/guitarist), Smashing Pumpkins, Grandson, Durand Jones, Gord Downie & Bob Rock (posthumous release of an album the late Tragically Hip singer spent years working on with the rock and metal producer), Artemis, Avishai Cohen & Abraham Rodriguez Jr., Asher Gamedze, Jeff Coffin, Alison Brown, Rodney Crowell, Logan Halstead, Sqürl (Jim Jarmusch & Carter Logan), yMusic, Dave Lombardo (Slayer and Mr. Bungle drummer’s solo debut), Death Goals, Drain, Jeromes Dream, Immaterial Possession, Angelica Olstad, SBTRKT, Flume, Kwes, Nxxxxxs, Aime Simone, Mareux, felicita, Beta Librae, Lcy, Olivia Jean, the Album Leaf, Westerman, Emily King, Ana Popovic, Greg Mendez, Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Jenny Owen Youngs, Sue Clayton and Cloth.

Rest in Peace

British pop/soul singer—and in-demand backing vocalist—LINDA LEWIS.