In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
We need songs like “Perfect.” Some of us may not want songs like “Perfect,” but they serve a function. People will always need slow-dance songs for proms or weddings or… there might be some third circumstance in which people need slow-dance songs. (Ed Sheeran concerts? I bet people slow-dance at those.) Recorded history has given us plenty of classic slow-dance songs, but for whatever reason, we crave a new one every so often. That song can sound like the old slow-dance songs. It kind of has to sound like the old slow-dance songs. But people want to hit the refresh button every so often, so someone needs to come up with a new song that does the same things as the old ones. Ed Sheeran is not too proud to be that person.
The work of writing new slow-dance ballads isn’t cool or glamorous, but it’s lucrative. Ed Sheeran has written a generous handful of songs like that, and they’ve brought him a lot of success. Sheeran was never considered cool or cutting-edge. For the most part, he doesn’t even get the critical respect that many of his mega-pop peers earn simply by default. That gives Sheeran the freedom to make cloying, hacky lighters-up love ballads without fear of reprisal. In terms of reputation, he has nothing to lose. In terms of chart success, he has a whole lot to gain.
In March 2017, Ed Sheeran released ÷, his biggest album. That’s the one with “Shape Of You,” the inescapable pseudo-Caribbean earworm that became the biggest Billboard hit of its year — bigger, even, than actual Caribbean earworm “Despacito,” if only through sheer radio-rotation longevity. The LP also had “Perfect,” a shamelessly square bid for wedding-dance immortality — one that was maybe even balder than the one that Sheeran had already released. “Perfect” came out as the fourth single from ÷, and it was already a big hit before Sheeran released the duet version that finally pushed the track to #1.
For that remix, Ed Sheeran pulled out the biggest gun possible: He got Beyoncé. If you can get Beyoncé to sing on a remix of your song, you should do that. She will upstage the motherfuck out of you, but she might make the song better. Whatever the song’s quality, you will be able to bask in her reflected glory, and it’ll make you look like a bigger deal. In this particular case, Beyoncé also benefitted from the exchange. The duet version of “Perfect” didn’t exactly win Beyoncé any cool points, but it did become her first Hot 100 chart-topper in nine years. That’s not nothing.
When I first started writing this column, the Beyoncé-duet version of “Perfect” was the #1 song in America. That was almost exactly seven years ago, and “Perfect” had nothing to do with the weird little whim I had to write about every chart-topper in Hot 100 history. If anything, I probably regarded songs like “Perfect” as the enemy — the middle-of-the-road music-business power-plays that often stand in the way of genuinely interesting pop-chart rupture moments like Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow.”
Seven years later, I’ve mellowed a little bit, and I can hear the craft that goes into something like “Perfect.” Familiarity has a way of turning former irritants like “Perfect” into accepted staples, too. My daughter has expressly forbidden me from telling a story about “Perfect” that involves her in fifth grade, so all I can tell you is that the story is both funny and cute. When a song like “Perfect” soundtracks a cute, funny moment in your kid’s life, then you might find it harder to hate that song. That’s how it often works, right? Once-despised pieces of corporate dreck force their way into your memory and eventually take on the sepia sheen of nostalgia. Look at this: I’m already making excuses about why I don’t hate “Perfect.” Maybe that’s a measure of Ed Sheeran’s lucrative squareness: I’m sitting here and negotiating with myself about whether I should hate this song.
“Perfect” is about as derivative as a 21st-century hit song can be. It’s not impossible to imagine someone like Sam Cooke singing “Perfect.” That’s probably the intent; Sheeran probably wants you to imagine Sam Cooke singing it. By the same token, it’s easy to imagine, say, Foreigner recording “Perfect” in 1982. It could’ve been a soft-pop ballad at virtually any stage of modern pop history. Ed Sheeran had written songs like this before, and they’d done well for him. In 2015, Sheeran made it to #2 with “Thinking Out Loud,” a song so smothered in historic pop-songwriting tropes that Sheeran had to defend himself from a copyright-infringement lawsuit over its similarities to Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” (“Thinking Out Loud” is a 7.) Sheeran won that lawsuit, and he never had to deal with a similar case over “Perfect.” Maybe that’s just because “Perfect” is too generic — its melody so instantly familiar that no other rights-holder could convincingly claim ownership.
Sheeran was thinking about “Thinking Out Loud” when he wrote “Perfect.” In a Music Choice interview, Sheeran said, “There was always a scare that ‘Thinking Out Loud’ would define me and define my career, so I wrote a lot of songs trying to beat it, and I think I have beaten it.” He was in competition with himself, trying to write another song that would be even more overbearingly obvious. He succeeded. I don’t think “Perfect” is a better song than “Thinking Out Loud,” but Sheeran managed to land two different songs in perpetual wedding-song rotation, a genuinely impressive feat.
Sheeran wrote “Perfect” for Cherry Seaborn, his girlfriend at the time. Sheeran and Seaborn had known each other as kids, and they reconnected and became a couple in 2015, after Sheeran was already famous. They got engaged in January 2018, probably while “Perfect” was sitting at #1 in America, and now they’re married with two kids. On “Perfect,” Sheeran sings that they were just kids when they fell in love, and that part might not be just a writerly flourish. He also sings about how he “found a love to carry more than just my secrets — to carry love, to carry children of our own.” That’s almost appallingly traditional, but it turned out to be true, too.
Some of the idea for “Perfect” came when Ed Sheeran went to Ibiza to visit former Number Ones artist James Blunt, perhaps his spiritual ancestor in the realm of wet-eyed British adult-contempo love balladry. One night, Sheeran and Blunt were up really late, jamming out to Future’s 2015 mixtape banger “March Madness,” a song that never became a Hot 100 hit. (In 2017, both Future and Sheeran rapped on Taylor Swift’s song “End Game,” which peaked at #18. Future will eventually appear in this column.) When Sheeran sings about him and his girlfriend barefoot in the grass dancing to their favorite song, he’s talking about “March Madness.” That’s pretty funny.
Ed Sheeran is the sole songwriter of the original “Perfect,” and he co-produced the track with Will Hicks, a sound engineer who he’d been working with since they both got their starts. “Perfect” started off as an acoustic ballad, but Sheeran and Hicks fleshed it out with a big, orchestral string arrangement from Sheeran’s brother Matthew. Sheeran played guitar and did his own backing vocals, while Hicks added more guitar, as well as percussion and drum programming. They got motherfucking Pino Palladino to play bass on the track.
When Ed Sheeran released ÷, “Perfect” was just one of its big heart-tugger ballads. In the UK, it debuted at #4 when the album came out. The LP was a full-on chart bomb, taking up nine of the top 10 spots on the singles chart and convincing the UK chart authorities to make it so that a single album couldn’t dominate the charts in the same way again. (There’s a strong argument that Billboard should do something similar over here.) “Perfect” didn’t get a real push as a single until September.
Jason Koenig, the Macklemore music-video director who’d previously made Sheeran’s “Shape Of You” video, directed a clip where Sheeran and Zoey Deutch go on a Swiss ski trip with friends. Deutch, Lea Thompson’s daughter, was ridiculously charming in Everybody Wants Some!!, a 2016 Richard Linklater movie that I rewatch at least once a year, and she was on her way to romantic-comedy glory in the 2018 Netflix joint Set It Up. I just saw her in Juror #2, but she didn’t get much to do in that. People should cast Zoey Deutch in more movies. Anyway, this continued Ed Sheeran’s streak of casting appallingly attractive women as his love interests in videos.
“Perfect” was already on its way up the Hot 100 before the duet version dropped. If I’m reading the confusingly worded Wikipedia page right, the song had already reached #5 when the Sheeran/Beyoncé take arrived. It’s a long-established chart trick to crank up the numbers of an already-released song by adding another big star; we’ve covered a bunch of examples in this column already. Sheeran and Beyoncé were presumably acquainted in the way that all big pop stars seem to be acquainted. At a 2015 Grammys tribute to Stevie Wonder, they performed together, covering “Master Blaster (Jammin’)” and “Higher Ground.” I wonder what it’s like to stand onstage next to a glammed-up Beyoncé and to look like a total schlub. I’ll never learn, but Ed Sheeran knows.
Sheeran knew that he wanted to launch “Perfect” as a single, and he figured that he might as well ask Beyoncé to sing on it, figuring that she’d say no. She said yes. The logistics were complicated. Beyoncé agreed to do the remix in May 2017, but she gave birth to twins in June. In September, Beyoncé got a chance to go in and record her part, and Sheeran says that she knocked it out in a single take. Beyoncé wrote her verse, and it was her idea to strip the song down, doing it with just vocals, organ hums, and acoustic guitar. Beyoncé’s verse on the duet is short, and it has the strange effect of turning “Perfect” into a song about Jay-Z: “I found a man stronger than anyone I know/ He shares my dreams, I hope that someday we’ll share a home.” Beyoncé and Jay probably already owned at least a half-dozen homes together, but that lyric wouldn’t have sounded as good.
I don’t really have any strong opinions about which version of “Perfect” is better. In both cases, the song is memorable and well-constructed, and it’s also painfully obvious and predictable. In both cases, the obvious point of comparison is former Number Ones artist Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight,” a #16 hit in 1978. The basic idea is the same: The lady doesn’t think she looks good, but the singer is like, “No, you look amazing.” In Sheeran’s version, he can barely get the words out: “When you said you looked a mess, I whispered underneath my breath/ But you heard it/ ‘Darling, you look perfect tonight.'” I have hated “Wonderful Tonight” for my entire life, and I’m not much predisposed to liking Sheeran’s take on that idea.
In both versions of “Perfect,” Sheeran’s lyrics are clunky as all hell. They evoke greeting cards, not actual feelings. But Sheeran is a much more convincingly sincere singer than Eric Clapton — not a high bar, really — and he knows how to set his hooks up to succeed. On the original “Perfect,” the strings and guitars and Pino Palladino bass wizardry add up to something workmanlike but effective. If you’re in the market for a song like this, “Perfect” probably gives you what you want. On the Beyoncé version, the simplified arrangement works nicely enough, even if it makes Sheeran’s lyrics harder to ignore. Beyoncé sounds utterly spectacular, as you’d expect. The song has nothing to do with the artfully inventive event-pop that had become Beyoncé’s trademark by 2017. Instead, it took her back to the hacky balladry of her earlier days, but she always knew how to deliver that hacky balladry. In a way, “Perfect” was the most obvious mainstream-pop play that Beyoncé had attempted in many years.
When the “Perfect” duet reached #1 a couple of weeks after its release, the song became Beyoncé’s first Hot 100 chart-topper since “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” all the way back in 2008. It’s not like Beyoncé went through a commercial decline in the nine years between “Single Ladies” and “Perfect.” Instead, she focused on making gleaming, layered statement-piece albums like the 2013 self-titled LP and 2016’s Lemonade. The songs on those records weren’t necessarily made with the radio in mind, though some of them became hits anyway. “Drunk In Love,” for instance, reached #2 in 2014. (It’s a 9.) But thanks in part to the way that she released her music on Jay-Z’s boutique streaming service Tidal, none of Beyoncé’s culturally resonant singles in that stretch had the commercial juice to go all the way to the top.
In 2017, Beyoncé seemingly decided that she wanted to start making proper chart hits again, and you can chart her tactics at work. That’s the year that she showed up on a remix of J Balvin and Willy William’s Spanish-language hit “Mi Gente,” pushing that song to #3. (It’s a 9.) That same year, Beyoncé also sang the hook on “Walk On Water,” a boring Eminem song that got stuck at #14. The “Perfect” duet was a clear shot at radio play, and it did what it needed to do. The Beyoncé version of “Perfect” didn’t become the dominant take on the track, at least not permanently. By the time that “Perfect” finished its run at #1, the version on top was the original solo-Sheeran one, not the Beyoncé duet. (Theoretically, I could’ve written two different columns about the two different versions of “Perfect,” but nobody wants that.) Either way, “Perfect” put Beyoncé back on top.
Beyoncé didn’t immediately get back to making big hits after “Perfect.” In 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z released their not-that-exciting collaborative album Everything Is Love, and their single “Apeshit” peaked at #13. In 2019, Beyoncé played a voice role in the Lion King remake and released the tie-in album The Gift, and that wasn’t her best work, either. “Black Parade,” the biggest single from The Gift, peaked at #37 in 2020. But Beyoncé is now fully back in the Hot 100 zone now. We’ll see her in this column again.
I don’t know if we’ll see Ed Sheeran again. The ÷ album went quintuple platinum, and the “Perfect” single is platinum 13 times over, but he hasn’t released another #1 hit as lead artist since then. None of the other songs from the ÷ album got serious pushes as singles, though the bummed-out ballad “Happier” reached #59. In 2019, Sheeran followed ÷ with No.6 Collaborations Project, a kind of conceptual album with guests on every track. The lead single was “I Don’t Care,” a duet with past collaborator Justin Bieber, and it peaked at #2. (It’s a 6.)
In 2021, Sheeran released his album = . (He’s still doing the math-operations thing.) A couple of the singles from that record made the top 10. The bigger of them was “Bad Habits,” which again peaked at #2. He hasn’t had another song in the top 10 since his follow-up “Shivers” reached #4. (“Bad Habits” is a 6, and “Shivers” is a 5.) In 2023, Sheeran released two albums. One of them was the proper pop effort –, which didn’t really have hits. Its biggest single was “Eyes Closed,” which stalled out at #18. He followed it with the more insular Autumn Variations, and none of the songs from that LP charted, but that wasn’t really the point. Sheeran recorded both of those 2023 albums with the National’s Aaron Dessner. Sheeran’s buddy Taylor Swift did very well by making a couple of records with Dessner, but Sheeran couldn’t pull off a similar pivot.
It’s possible that Ed Sheeran’s pop moment is over, but I wouldn’t count on it. Sheeran is still a legitimate stadium act all over the world, America very much included. He’s still writing hits for other people; a song that Sheeran co-wrote for someone else will eventually appear in this column. And people are still getting married. Sooner or later, people will want another big love ballad — maybe one that doesn’t have the slight veneer of irony that I hear in the song that’s sitting at #1 right now. When that moment arrives, Ed Sheeran will be sitting right there, happy to supply the demand.
GRADE: 5/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s the scene in the widely detested 2021 straight-to-Amazon Cinderella movie where streaming-movie hunk Nicholas Galitzine and Ed Sheeran collaborator Camila Cabello sing “Perfect” together:
(Nicholas Galitzine doesn’t have any Hot 100 hits, either solo or as a member of the fictional boy band August Moon. Camila Cabello will appear in this column very soon.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Baby, I’m dancing in the dark with you between my arms, barefoot on the grass, writing about our favorite song. Buy it here.
