Thursday, February 13, 2025
Time: 5:00 PM
Song: The A Team
Artist: Ed Sheeran
Mode of Consumption: Listening to MP3s while driving home from work.
Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/1VdZ0vKfR5jneCmWIUAMxK?si=3ca0a690af864d81
I pull onto Galena Avenue in Dixon and this song comes on my MP3s. Hmmm, I wonder when this got added.
I have no memory of it. Frankly, I don’t know if I have ever heard this song before. Ed Sheeran songs all sort of sound the same to me.
Clearly, I missed most of the Ed Sheeran fad. Probably too old. Maybe too male. I don’t know.
My two memories of Ed Sheeran are two appearances he made as an actor.
The first is playing himself in the movie, “Yesterday.” The quick synopsis is that in a blink the Beatles are removed from the timeline of the world for everyone save one man named Jack, who then becomes a superstar by recording all their songs.
Jack meets Ed Sheeran (playing himself, I believe), and there is a scene where the two have an impromptu songwriting contest. Sheeran writes a very Ed Sheeran type song, and Jack whips out “The Long and Winding Road.” Sheeran admits his defeat, and seems to indict he had been some sort of champion of impromptu songwriting contests.
I remember thinking it was a strange scene, because I’ve never heard of musical artists competing in this fashion. Also, I don’t know why Ed Sheeran was the champion of such contests, and why speed of songwriting is important. Finally, “The Long and Winding Road” has never been one of my favorite Beatle tunes, so Jack picking that one didn’t hit with me.
The second Ed Sheeran appearance was his brief role in HBO’s “The Game of Thrones.” Sheeran plays a singing soldier in the Lannister army. Sheeran and a small band of Lannister soldiers are camped alongside the Kingsroad and unwittingly encounter Arya Stark, fresh off killing the entire Frey family and now a trained Faceless Man assassin. While never revealing her identity, Stark tells the soldiers she is traveling to King’s Landing to murder Queen Cersei. They all laugh.
The scene is meant to emphasize that while Cersei Lannister and many of her family were power hungry monsters, the men fighting in the army were basically normal people just doing what they are told. Small cogs stuck in the wheel that Daenerys Targaryen had claimed to want to break in an episode around this same time.
I think the scene took heat when it was released because it didn’t really seem to serve a purpose other than to get Sheeran some air time. Maybe so.
I think it probably was supposed to remind Arya that there had to be a limit to her thirst for revenge.
Ultimately where it missed the mark was that the showrunners should have had some of the same Lannister soldiers appear in the second-to-final episode when Daenerys is burning King’s Landing and her Unsullied are mercilessly killing Lannister men who have surrendered. Seeing this band of normal guys murdered would have drove home the point that Daenerys had lost sight of breaking the wheel and instead was crushing the cogs caught on it.
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