The 2010s File Feature
Best Part Of Me
Best Part of Me — Ed Sheeran Featuring YEBBA: Chart History and Commercial Reception "Best Part of Me" appeared on Ed Sheeran's 2019 album No.6 Collaboration…
01 The Story
Best Part of Me — Ed Sheeran Featuring YEBBA: Chart History and Commercial Reception
"Best Part of Me" appeared on Ed Sheeran's 2019 album No.6 Collaborations Project, an ambitious collection released on July 12, 2019, through Asylum Records and Atlantic Records. The album, which paired Sheeran with a diverse roster of collaborators including Justin Bieber, Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, Eminem, and Bruno Mars, represented a deliberate pivot from the more personal singer-songwriter mode of his preceding albums toward an expansive, collaboration-driven project that showcased his adaptability across genres and sonic environments. "Best Part of Me" occupied a more intimate corner of this sprawling album, featuring the rising American R&B singer YEBBA, born Abbey Smith, whose soulful voice provided a powerful counterpoint to Sheeran's warmer, more conversational delivery.
YEBBA had been one of the most discussed emerging voices in R&B and soul circles before appearing on "Best Part of Me," having released a series of recordings that drew comparisons to classic soul singers for their raw emotional intensity and technical command. Her appearance on one of the year's most commercially anticipated albums introduced her to an audience far larger than her existing fanbase and contributed significantly to her subsequent commercial profile. For Sheeran, the collaboration represented a genuine artistic stretch, placing his voice alongside a singer whose power and emotional range offered a different kind of dynamic than his more typical collaborations.
The production on "Best Part of Me" was subdued relative to much of the album's surrounding material, built around acoustic guitar and restrained arrangement choices that prioritized the two vocalists' interplay above sonic spectacle. Sheeran's production instincts on this track favored intimacy over impact, creating a soundscape that felt closer to his early acoustic work than to the polished pop production of his commercial peak period. This quality gave the track a distinct character within the album's broader sonic landscape and allowed YEBBA's voice to carry the emotional weight of the recording without competing against elaborate production elements.
No.6 Collaborations Project debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in the United States, having also topped charts in the United Kingdom and numerous other markets simultaneously. The album's debut-week performance was one of the strongest of Sheeran's career, reflecting both the sustained commercial appeal he had built through his preceding studio albums and the promotional power generated by an unusually star-studded collaborator roster. "Best Part of Me" charted on the Billboard Hot 100 as part of the album's debut-week streaming activity, with its more understated qualities sustaining a longer streaming tail than some of the album's more bombastic tracks.
Critical reception to "Best Part of Me" was among the most enthusiastic of any track on the album, with reviewers singling out YEBBA's performance in particular as a revelation for listeners unfamiliar with her previous work. The track was described as a highlight of an album that many critics found inconsistent in quality despite its commercial ambitions, precisely because its restraint and emotional authenticity contrasted favorably with some of the more aggressively commercial collaborations elsewhere on the tracklist. Music publications noted that the pairing of Sheeran and YEBBA produced a chemistry that felt genuinely earned rather than artificially engineered for commercial cross-pollination.
The song received recognition at the Grammy Awards, where the album was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album, maintaining Sheeran's presence in the awards conversation that had followed him since Divide. YEBBA's contribution to the track was widely cited in profiles and critical assessments of her emerging career as evidence that she was capable of competing at the highest commercial level without compromising the raw expressiveness that had made her reputation in smaller-scale contexts.
In the years following its release, "Best Part of Me" accumulated substantial streaming totals, sustained by consistent inclusion in romantic and soul playlists on major streaming platforms. Its relatively timeless acoustic production and universal thematic content, love's persistence despite personal imperfection, positioned it well for long-tail streaming success beyond the album's initial release window. The track stands as one of the most enduringly beloved moments from what proved to be a pivotal transitional album in Sheeran's discography.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of "Best Part of Me" — Imperfection, Love, and the Redemptive Gaze
"Best Part of Me" is a love song built around an inversion of the conventional romantic declaration. Rather than asserting the narrator's virtues or celebrating the perfection of the beloved, the track opens from a position of frank self-assessment, acknowledging flaws, failures, and the general messiness of being human, before arriving at a claim that is more surprising and emotionally powerful for what preceded it: that the person being addressed is the best thing that has happened to the narrator despite and in the context of all these acknowledged imperfections. This structural inversion gives the song a warmth and credibility that more straightforwardly celebratory love songs often lack.
Ed Sheeran's vocal performance on the track communicates this emotional sequence with the understated sincerity that has defined his most affecting work. His delivery is conversational in a way that avoids the risk of seeming calculated, the words arriving with the quality of thoughts being articulated for the first time rather than polished sentiments being performed. This quality is particularly important for a song whose central claim depends on the listener believing that the narrator has genuinely reckoned with his own inadequacy before arriving at the affirmation that structures the track's emotional arc.
YEBBA's contribution transforms the track from a solo confession into a dialogue and, in doing so, transforms its emotional meaning. When the second voice enters the conversation and reflects the narrator's sentiment back at him, the song's central claim becomes reciprocal: both speakers are simultaneously the one who falls short and the one who is recognized as another person's best discovery. This reciprocity is crucial because it moves the song away from the potentially self-regarding territory of a single speaker cataloguing his own flaws and toward something more genuinely mutual, a shared acknowledgment of imperfection and a shared choice to love anyway.
The acoustic production environment of the track reinforces this intimacy by stripping away the sonic elements that might otherwise mediate the emotional exchange. The voices are foregrounded in a way that makes the listener feel like an eavesdropper on a private conversation rather than an audience for a constructed performance. This quality of overheard intimacy is one of the more distinctive creative achievements of the recording and contributes significantly to the emotional impact that reviewers noted upon the song's release.
Thematically, "Best Part of Me" participates in a broader cultural conversation about the relationship between self-knowledge and romantic love, the question of whether it is possible to be genuinely loved by someone who sees you clearly. The song's answer is affirmative, but the affirmation is earned rather than assumed. The track does not suggest that love is possible despite imperfection as a matter of wishful thinking but demonstrates through its emotional structure that honest self-assessment and genuine love are not merely compatible but mutually reinforcing. Sheeran's catalog has returned to this territory repeatedly across his career, and "Best Part of Me" represents one of the most elegant and emotionally convincing treatments of the subject he has produced.
For YEBBA, the song's meaning is additionally significant as an introduction to an audience that would subsequently follow her into her solo work, where the same emotional directness and vocal power that she brings to "Best Part of Me" are central to her artistic identity. The track functions as a kind of compressed demonstration of what makes her a distinctive voice in contemporary soul music, offering in the space of a few minutes the qualities that her subsequent solo releases would develop more fully. That dual function, as both an emotionally complete artistic statement and an implicit announcement of a significant new voice, makes "Best Part of Me" one of the more consequential tracks that either artist was associated with during the year of its release.
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