Meet me on the floor tonight

Show me how to movе like the water

In between the dancin' lights

Be mine, be mine, azizam

Azizam

Azizam

I wanna get lost in your ocean and drown

I wanna be careless and free

I wanna live here in the moment we found

This came out lovely! This is "Azizam" by Ed Sheeran as I see it because of synesthesia!

Be mine, be mine, Azizam!

I should be doing commissions, but I needed to draw a pic of Russell and Ash to make me feel better. Here they're dancing to Ed Sheeran's Azizam in a club. Realistically, in this world, that song would be over 200 years old.

I personally was never quite into the romance genre. But having read Iranian Canadian author Arezou Amin’s magnificent debut novel, The Aroosi Arrangment, coming out October 14, I realized just how badly I, and many other SWANA people, need to have this sort of representation. Continue reading Author Arezou Amin on Writing Iranian Canadian Love in ‘The Aroosi Arrangement’

Ed Sheeran - Play

I talk about a lot of different kinds of music, but I don’t talk about pop music all that much anymore. There’s a reason for that, and it’s because pop music kind of sucks now. Not totally, mind you, but I remember back a decade ago when pop music was in a different space. Drake, Future, Lil Wayne, Frank Ocean, Charlie Puth, Bruno Mars, Halsey, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and many more artists were popular then, but it seems like a new crop of artists have risen in the ranks. Sabrina Carpenter, Benson Boone, Teddy Swims, and Alex Warren are some of the big names now, but there are a handful of artists whose stars haven’t dimmed yet. They’re not as big as they were a decade ago, but they’re not obscure. A few artists have only gotten bigger, like Kendrick Lamar, but a reliable artist that’s always been around is Englishman Ed Sheeran.

Ed Sheeran is a name that you may not have heard in a long time, because he hasn’t had a big of a hit in recent years like “Bad Habit,” “Shape Of You,” or “Thinking Out Loud,” but he’s still trucking. He’s dropped a few albums over the last few years, but most recently he put out an album entitled Play. Just like with his series of mathematical symbols, now he’s doing a series of playback buttons on a VCR player for some reason, the first being the aforementioned album. I haven’t listened to Ed Sheeran in around eight years or so, but I decided to check it out for kicks. I’ve been listening to it throughout the last week, and you know, I quite like this album.

This is Ed Sheeran returning to a big pop sound, which we hadn’t really seen since a little under a decade ago. I can see why maybe people wouldn’t, but in terms of a pop album, it’s pretty solid. There is a bit of an identity crisis here, however, because as much as he wants to be a big pop star, folk Ed comes back from time to time here. This album is around 45 minutes (it’s around 51 if you get the deluxe edition, which has two bonus tracks), and it does kind of feel its length by the end, but it isn’t bad at all. On both ends of the spectrum, you have songs like “Azizam,” which is this really cool Persian-influenced pop song, or “Old Phone,” which is a folk-pop song about nostalgia and finding an old phone that has messages, texts, and pictures you forgot about.

I really like both of these songs, but that’s the first issue I have with this album: he tries to meet both of his sounds in the middle, and while the songs work individually, it can be a bit messy as a whole. He leans more into pop this time around, but there are a handful of folk-pop songs that slow the album down. Thankfully, Sheeran is a good enough singer to pull it off, and he makes both sounds work. He does have an overwhelming Persian and Indian influence, and I don’t know why, but I like it. Songs like “Sapphire,” “Azizam,” and “Symmetry” all have that influence, but it’s so fun. The folk songs are done well, too, and they show off his voice.

I like the lyrics on this album quite a bit, too, even if they’re pretty basic a lot of the time, but what’s cool is the Indian and Persian influence. There are lyrics sung in those languages, and it’s cool to hear Sheeran utilizing a different culture, and not doing it in an appropriating way. It feels like he genuinely enjoys this type of music, but the lyrics are mainly his usual schtick of corny but sweet love songs with some introspection thrown in. He’s got some songs that deviate from that, such as “A Little More,” but I like a lot of the lyrics here.