"Sing," the album's Pharrell Williams-produced lead single, is an interchangeable if exuberant booty-call anthem that pays tribute to Justin Timberlake and makes money off of Sheeran's beefy falsetto. This is the meat of what Ed Sheeran does, even though with X, he's bent on proving he can also shirt-shed with the best of them. But mostly it's comforting, and steadfast, with its Coldplay-style chords calmly building in a chorus about "the way our horizons meet," and Sheeran's murmured lines about two kids listening to Snow Patrol and walking hand and hand down strange new streets. "All of the Stars" is calm and melancholic, and romantic - it mentions that Amsterdam night. Fittingly, he wrote the song that runs over the end credits in The Fault in Our Stars it's also included in his just-released new album, X. Ed Sheeran is the ruling master of the form. And though it may be the essence of boy-girl relationships in contemporary young adult fiction (see Harry and Hermione, Katniss and Gale and the sisters in Frozen), in pop music, romantic friendship is a subject left to artists frequently condemned for being sappy or, at best, insipidly sensitive: those acoustic guitar strummers and piano pounders who make melodies that force you to sing them, and litter their lyrics with images that alternate between the sentimentally sublime and the endearingly quotidian. This is the fluid, sometimes confusing, infinitely rich experience of romantic friendship. All of their talking and fond looks, picnics and shared practical jokes allow Hazel and Gus to emerge as a twosome within a process of mutual testing and genuine acceptance. Not that it matters: that phrase resonates because viewers of The Fault in Our Stars have spent the previous two hours watching Hazel and Gus develop a relationship in which sex actually does matter - especially to Gus, who is a virgin when he meets Hazel and doesn't want to die that way - but isn't the central element. And, in a line not in John Green's 2012 novel, she adds: "Not that it matters." She smiles the calm, contained smile of a realist. Someone else refers to her as Gus's "special friend." Shailene Woodley, playing Hazel, seems to pull herself up by an arched eyebrow when she responds. Three hankies and at least a dozen wry jokes into the summertime-sad film version of the novel The Fault in Our Stars, the story's heroine, Hazel Grace Lancaster, is speaking about her first love and fellow "cancer kid," Augustus Waters. You've Got A Friend: Ed Sheeran's second album, X, released this week, sets out to prove that the "friend zone" doesn't have to be toxic.
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