Chris Martin: My Life in 10 Songs

“Yellow” is a good place to start, because without this song there wouldn’t be any of the others. Like any of our really good songs, I had nothing to do with it. It just happened to arrive to me. We were recording in Wales at a studio called Rockfield in 1999 or early 2000, and I was recording a song called “Shiver.” I was doing this acoustic part and the tape machine broke. I had no idea about all of the spiritual writing around things like “look at what’s missing as an opportunity,” or “the crack is where the light comes in.” But here it was on full display without me knowing it. There was a problem, something was broken, and it created a space for something cool to arrive. 

I went outside, and I was with our producer at the time, Ken Nelson. He said, “Look at the stars.” It was such a beautiful night, and this studio is in the middle of nowhere, so the stars were so glorious. I went back in, and the tape machine still wasn’t working. I started to think about the words “look at the stars.” And I was like, Neil Young always makes the word “stars” sound so American. So I was messing around trying to sing like Neil Young — but my Neil Young sounds a bit like Kermit the Frog. Then I played a chord. I had no idea what the chord was; it sounded really nice. Before I knew it, this whole song just dropped through. 

The title “Yellow” came from this phone book called the Yellow Pages. This whole song came from a mistake, a break, a dysfunctional piece of machinery, what happened to be lying around, and the stars themselves. It was just all a gift. I went through to where Jonny and Will were playing FIFA football in the lounge and I said, “Listen to this — what do you think?” They barely looked up. “Yeah, that’s all right.” It was a long time between that song arriving and us really knowing how to play it properly, but we kept going until it sounded like what you hear now. 

“Yellow” was our passport everywhere. The first time we came to America — before I had the good tools to manage my emotions — I had a real tantrum because the record label had changed the cover of that single to be more yellow. I freaked out because I was like, “No, no, we specifically chose this shade of warm orange.” They’re like, “But we don’t understand. The song’s called ‘Yellow.’” And I was like, “You don’t understand me.” Now, I would handle that more diplomatically.

We had an album called A Rush of Blood to the Head, and the last song we recorded for that was “Clocks,” which, again, just felt like it fell through my fingers. I think if I was to try and work out what that piano was inspired by, there’s a Bruce Springsteen song where the piano part has a similar kind of arpeggio. But I don’t know. The lyrics, even on the record, are not quite finished. Over the years, I’ve sort of worked out what that mumble was trying to say. There’s certain songs which arrive fully-formed and even the mumbles make sense, and you don’t mess with them.

It became a single in 2003, which is when you might have heard it. But any quote-unquote hit single we’ve had, any pop artist would be so disappointed with those chart positions. It’s not actual pop music. They tend to find their way over time. I think “Clocks” maybe got to Number 50 or something like that, which is funny, because in so many ways, all of our biggest successes looked like failures at the time. But like I said, with certain songs you just know this is special. 

It’s one of the songs that we still have to play, every show, and it’s fun to play. When we played a festival called Glastonbury, we played the big stage for the first time that year, and we got this massive green laser — which for us was the biggest deal. Ever since then, whenever we play “Clocks,” there has to be a laser. Otherwise, I feel like it’s missing its identity.

We were having a very, very difficult time as a band. We had just become relatively successful with the first two albums. Phil [Harvey], who’s our creative director and my best friend, had left because his role had become so administrative. We were still on the same label, but the ownership at that time was obsessed with share prices. They were putting a lot of pressure on us about their share price — which is a weird thing to put on a band. We didn’t know any better. I’d just got married. I had a baby, who’s now a young woman. I was so out of my depth in every direction, and so were the rest of us. There was addiction — there was just all of the things.

The only thing that really was a positive was, of course, having my daughter. Her mom had been given this keyboard called a Korg Triton by her dad, who had passed away. This keyboard had sounds on it that I’d never heard before. I had sent a whole bunch of demos to our label, and our A&R guy called me back and said, “There’s nothing on here that’s good.” And he was right, with the exception of a song called “Gravity.” At that time, I was quite unsure of myself. I was lucky that songs were still arriving. That album has some good melodies and some good songs. But we failed, basically, on that whole album to get any of them produced right or edited right. It’s too long. There’s too many songs. I’m singing about the same thing too much. It’s full of problems — except the song “Fix You,” which made us survive for five years. I would change little bits of it, but it was a good recording.

That song came from the situation that we were in. It was just everything that felt broken. The band was a mess. We were not sure why we were doing it. We weren’t getting along. We didn’t have our own place to go and play. This song was the light in a dark period for the band. All I remember about recording that album was that it was just terrible. It was just mistake after mistake and problem after problem. I didn’t have any tools to handle anything, so I would get triggered really easily. I would get angry really easily. It would cause division in the band, and no one else felt creatively free because I was like an insecure tyrant at that time. 

I’m happy we went through that period, because we had to. It led to some really great things afterwards. But if it wasn’t for “Fix You,” that would have been the end of the band. 

This song changed a lot for us. It was the beginning of a whole new life. We started studying with Brian Eno and a guy called Markus Dravs. We found a little space to call our own and we went back to nothing — as if nothing had ever happened and we hadn’t had any success or anything. There was no pressure except to rediscover the joy of being in a band. 

For my part, I had to learn to let Guy, Will, and Jonny be fully free to try anything. I let go of a lot of control freakiness, but replaced it with a clear vision, which is two different things. Within a vision, I think you can let everyone be fully themselves and go for it. Whereas with a control freak, it makes people feel stifled, and that’s not a good thing in a band. So Brian came in and just blew all those cobwebs away and all that fear away. And I’d say that Jonny, Will, and Guy have been much happier in the band since Brian reeducated us. So have I, actually. Brian was 60 at the time. He would come in every day like a child full of curiosity and wonder and excitement and the joy of music and the joy of failure and trying things that don’t work. 

That album was a real rediscovery of joy, and all of that album centered around this one song, “Viva la Vida.” That was probably the song that fell through most naturally, but then took months to get the production right. There were versions of it that were not good. Even when it was finished, our label asked us to take it off the album because they said it didn’t really sound like Coldplay. But we just felt like, no — it doesn’t sound like the other type of Coldplay. But what we are, as a band, is a band who are committed to doing what feels right at the time and following the songs.

The story of that song is funny because it came from being a massive Rihanna fan and loving the repeating of “ella, ella, ella” at the end of “Umbrella.” And I was thinking, I wonder if you could do that at the beginning of a song, and repeat the first syllable, “para-, para-, para-.” Then, The X Factor — that show was ginormous at that time, and like everyone else, I loved watching it. I was thinking, “I wonder if they’d ever let me have a go at the song for the winner in 2011.” So I was thinking about those two things: Rihanna songs and The X Factor. And then into my head popped this “para-, para-, paradise” idea. I played it to the rest of the band. I said, “I think we should give this away to the winner of The X Factor.” And Will was like, “No, we’re not giving that up. We’ll do that one. Thank you very much.” The irony being, of course, that we ended up playing it on The X Factor that Christmas. 

It didn’t take that long to produce, but it was missing two lines of lyrics and it was driving me crazy. Sometimes with the songs that are basically fully formed, there’s two key bits missing. In that one, there was a line that went, “So lying underneath those stormy skies, she’d say—” And I was like, I don’t know what she would say to get back to “this could be paradise.” It took months and months and months. I auditioned 1,000 different [things that] she might say to know that she could turn this place into paradise. The one I settled on isn’t the poetry of Shakespeare, but it makes sense, which is: “The sun must set to rise.” As soon as that came to us, OK, now the song’s finished. Now we can release it. A lot of that album was designed to be part of a musical movie about an alien with magical feet, but that got too complicated. It was just the beginning of taking off all the limits. If we have a song that’s a strange trap, ska, reggae, metal song and we like it, then we’re going to do it. It was so liberating.

The rest of the band were back in England. I was here in L.A. I called Avicii and said, there’s a song called “A Sky Full of Stars,” please will you help produce it? I’d never met him before, and he came in like a thunderbolt. Have you ever seen The Incredibles? You know the kid, Dash? Avicii was like Dash. He would do things so quickly that you wouldn’t be able to see it. I’d done the piano and the vocals. The next morning, I received a fully formed EDM banger on my phone from him — like, done. It was incredible. And then we, being Coldplay, spent three months trying to marry that sound with the sound of the band to make something that was different to just straight-up EDM. 

It caused a bit of conflict, that song, because we hadn’t really jumped into that world before. But by the end we deconstructed it enough. In the end, it got to a place where it was something that we all felt was right for that song. Will, our drummer, said, “I don’t know how I feel about this song.” But then once we put it in the context of the album, he saw, OK, it comes here. Then he was fully on board. We would never release a song if he was not into it. But for Will and for everybody, actually, the context and the clothing around things is so important. And that one took extra effort to make sure that that EDM-ness fit.

In my experience, the more that people are able to express themselves and release what’s hurting them and then be themselves, the higher chance they have of loving themselves, but also loving other people and accepting other people. “A Sky Full of Stars” is really our song about unconditional love. It’s a fun song to play now and we have a gimmick with it live that makes it even more fun. In a way, that’s how we feel about anyone who’s ever heard of our band. It’s like, you might like us, you might not like us. We love you. Don’t worry about it. It’s OK. Whatever you feel is OK. We’re not going to bite you back. And that’s a nice place to live in. Even if I’m not feeling like that that day, singing that song puts me back in that — OK, whatever you say. We don’t wish you any harm at all. You do what you want to do.

I was feeling, around A Head Full of Dreams, “Our next single can’t be a song where I’m in the front of it. That’s tired.” Every so often, Jonny, who’s a very humble guy — his parts are incredible and they seem to fit with the melodies I’m singing. They really complement each other. That’s what we started the band from. He’s never that comfortable leading the song, but he did it once with a song called “In My Place.” And I was thinking, “God, I wish we could do a song where it was led by the guitar riff. We haven’t had one of those for so long.” One of my big jobs is to listen to Jonny improvise over the loop of a new song, which is a technique Brian Eno taught us. You loop a section of the song and then Jonny finds his parts by just playing over and over and over. 

And there was a jam called “Legends,” which was not a very good song, but Jonny was playing on it. He was playing this riff. And I said, “That riff is amazing.” Then it sat for a bit and we went in with Stargate. It was a bit of a hodgepodge. There was a chord sequence I was playing with and the title “Adventure of a Lifetime,” which was much quicker. I can’t remember how it happened, but they took his riff and made it fit on this new rhythm. It was just immediately, “Oh, that’s splendid.” And I’m allowed to say that because it’s not me. I’m so grateful for that riff, and I’m so grateful for that person, because it’s a musical match. It’s fun to play that song. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best from what I’m doing, but the feel of it is really important for us. And the riff is magic. 

Everyday Life doesn’t really have singles and was never meant to. We had to pull a song off it. Now, I would follow Billie Eilish’s lead, or Taylor‘s or Beyoncé’s, and say none of these can withstand being a single. The song that was most important to me on it was this song “Daddy,” which is not a single at all. 

I don’t know if it’s about me apologizing to my kids or talking to my dad. At that time, I was reading about the American justice system. There’s a book called The New Jim Crow, about the massive over-incarceration of innocent Black men and the removal of a generation in that way. I was quite upset about learning this. So many dads are taken away from their kids and they haven’t done anything at all — nothing. They’ve done nothing at all. It’s a system where you are designed to be screwed over if you look the wrong way. 

That whole album is about things like that. I love to sing about the power of love, and that being the ultimate force that’s worth following. But I don’t want that to sound ignorant — and I know it does sometimes — so it was important for us to make Everyday Life. Look, these are the things we see happening. We’re not living in an utopian vacuum. We know Earth is full of problems, and this is how we’d feel if they were happening to us, or this is what I feel when I read that story. In a way, I was nervous to try and go to that place, but I think the way to do that was with a song like “Daddy.” How would I feel, or what part of that experience can I relate to, if any? What can my kids relate to? Well, their dad isn’t wrongfully incarcerated, but I was away a lot. 

Bill Rahko, who works with us, I had asked him if he ever had any bits of music lying around. He had a bit of music and a little bit of melody. I was listening to his loop that he’d made and the chorus came into my head, “You, you are, my universe.” And I was like, well, if I sing “you,” then someone else should sing that back right away: “You, you, you are, you are,” like that. 

I’d got a message that BTS were looking for a song — which wasn’t true. And I thought, don’t be ridiculous. That would never work. Don’t be crazy. But it stuck in my head. Anyway, the song was about people who are told they can’t be together — whether that’s Romeo and Juliet, or interracial couples, or interfaith couples, or places where there’s no LGBTQ permission. It felt like the coolest person to sing that song with would be someone who we’re not supposed to be with. It turned out to be the most uplifting, natural collaboration. I would do anything for those guys at any time. They were so good. They made the song so great. 

A bit embarrassingly, I tried to sing fake Korean in the break in the pre-chorus — which I hope no one ever hears, because A, it’s probably wrong to do that on some level, and B, it sounded ridiculous. But then I called RM from BTS and said, “Here’s how it goes.” And he said, “No problem.” They wrote their lyrics and then all their ad-libs. My goddaughter educated me about ARMY and who everyone was. By the time I got to Seoul, I really knew about the rap team and I was like, well, we have to have a section where Suga and J-Hope can do some rapping. It was so fun in the studio. At first everyone was really nervous of each other, like, “What is this?” And there’s cameras everywhere in their world. But by the end, it was like, oh, this was always meant to be. Now we’re a boy band of seven really good-looking young Koreans and one old white guy, and it’s totally fine. 

We just follow the song where the song wants to go — even if that song makes you fly to Korea to work with a boy band, knowing that in doing so you’re destroying any shred of cool or credibility and you risk upsetting their fans too. That’s the philosophy that we live by … I think with all of these songs we’ve chosen for this, they’ve all been allowed to be themselves, and the identity of the band has grown to accommodate that. So now, if we said, “Oh, we want to do a song with One Direction,” no one would think anything of it. I don’t think that’s possible right now, because they’ve gone in five directions. But it’s fun to let the band grow.

“All My Love” is really the final Coldplay single. After this, there’s no more singles, because we don’t want to do that. Of all of the songs that have dropped through really quickly, this is maybe the one that I just don’t understand how it happened. I’m so grateful for this song. I don’t know if and when it will connect with who or not, but for me, it’s a really important song. It’s like, after everything we’ve been through, you have all my love. That’s it. That’s how we feel about life and the world and our fans and our critics and everybody. I didn’t really have to do anything on that song. I just played it. I don’t know how to explain that. Even when I’m playing it now, I’m like, how did that come through?

The first time [playing it live] was an unplanned thing, because there was a guy that tried to get on stage and then fell. That was not great in any way. The end of our show was kind of biffed. There was a tension in the air because it was a strange move on his part and he could have died. Thank goodness he didn’t. So I thought, well, this song is just to kind of calm down. Whatever’s happened, it’s all love.

I love singing it, I love playing it, and I don’t really have anything to say about it other than Coldplay has never been cool. Never will be cool. We might be Number One or we might be Number 100. None of it really matters. We get sent these songs and we do them for the people that like them, and even sometimes for the people who don’t like them, so that they can express some aggression at us safely. So with “All My Love,” I just feel like, well, relax. These are our songs and this is what we do. And if you like it, amazing. Here it is for you.