When I first heard Ed Sheeran’s “A Team,” I was fifteen years old and a bit love drunk. I romanticized the words of the song, envisioning a woman in the clouds, “stuck in her daydream,” who had met her love and had “been this way since eighteen.” I along with many may have assumed her lover was a man, and were shocked to find that this love was actually crack cocaine.

Ed Sheeran is a lyrical genius, a master of subtleties and masking profound meanings behind upbeat tempos and ambiguous lyrics. I was a naive fifteen year old when I used to jam out to “A Team,” oblivious to the true meaning of lyrics such as “lately her face seems / slowly sinking, wasting / crumbling like pastries” and “sells her love to another man.” Instead I made this song my own, envisioning a woman losing interest in her lover rather than one crippled by addiction, forced to sell her body to keep her mind at bay. Lines such as “go mad for a couple grams” were completely lost to me.

I like to think of this song as a lyrical illusion, because like an optical illusion, once the true meaning was revealed, it became nearly impossible to perceive the song any other way. Ed Sheeran stated that his inspiration for “A Team” originated in what he saw after performing at a homeless shelter at eighteen years old. He chose to conceal the dark subject of the tune with a soft guitar and upbeat tempo, in the same way that the realities of addiction were hidden from him up until his experience at the shelter.

Maybe my relationship with “A Team” is illustrative of my resistance to growing up, but whenever I hear this song I wish I could reverse what I know about its meaning and still hear the lyrics as I did as a naive high schooler. Growing up and experiencing addiction through the eyes of a friend, however, has allowed me to appreciate this prime example of musical poetry in a completely different way.

Sony/ATV Music Publishing (Uk) Limited

lyrics: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/edsheeran/theateam.html