Just some thoughtful dude thinkin’ things over.

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[3.43]

Anthony Easton: I cannot imagine anything scarier than enduring Ed Sheeran bleating like a wet sheep for the next forty years of my life. His voice refuses to buy into the lyrics he is saying, and the under playing does not seem to be a deliberate choice. He is not working with his instrument, and so it collapses.
[0]

Juana Giaimo: On my blurb for “Don’t” I wrote that it’s easy to identify the singles on X, and, while “Thinking Out Loud” may not be an obvious single for other artists, Ed Sheeran got popular thanks to ballads and this is one of his best. He is in love and maybe too sugary and hopeful sometimes, but his feelings are still sincere, especially when he balances them with rational thoughts in lines like “when the crowds don’t rembemer my name” or “I’ll just keep on making the same mistakes”. 
[8]

Iain Mew: Its looking forward to a love lasting into old age is like Elbow’s “Newborn” with most of the ugly edges sanded away (“’til we’re 70” vs “end of your days”) to leave only the romance. It’s a weak kind of romance though, its slow dance blandness highlighting how little it really engages with its premise and leaving Sheeran’s more intense vocal moments uncomfortably out of place.
[3]

Micha Cavaseno: More iced-coffee-soul from your old Toad. John Mayer is sniggering somewhere at the sonic triteness of this arrangement, and how Sheeran isn’t going to make the money that he’d made about a decade ago with this same kind of novel ‘sincerity’. The triteness of it all is so precocious (“maybe at the drop of a hat”, what, you’re not sure? So even you can admit this is as shallow as it seems?) that you have to roll your eyes.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Going for the John Mayer market, he allows himself to steal the chords from “Waiting For the World to Change” but doesn’t snap off words in the middle. He won’t win Mayer’s fans though. One key line sounds like he’s singing “My mouse still remembers the taste of your love.”
[2]

Abby Waysdorf: Sounds remarkably like Billy Bragg’s “I Keep Faith,” but less good. His voice doesn’t have the personality to make it work, nor the verve to keep the song going. This will sell a million copies, or whatever the 2014 version of that is, in the holiday season. 
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Thoughts can lack eloquence till spoken, so maybe the glaring disconnect between much of these intermittently gibberish lyrics could be palmed off as a glaring reflection of the eloquence of love in the face of ineffability. Maybe, were the song not about as emotive as a wooden spoon.
[4]