On a recent afternoon in Malibu, Coldplay’s front man, Chris Martin, was enjoying a brief downtime between tour dates. “We have breaks, but only the way Serena Williams gets a banana between sets,” he said, pulling his bare feet under him. Martin, forty-seven, was wearing an emerald green jacket with a picture of the Earth on it and fastened with a small white button that said “Love.” Later, when he took off the jacket, he revealed a blue shirt with the same button. I wondered, but did not ask, how many of them he had. It seemed indicative of Martin’s essence at this particular moment: love, endlessly layered.
Martin was in the midst of converting an old property into a studio and Coldplay’s actual headquarters. The complex was surrounded by steep clay slopes interspersed with sagebrush and evergreen oak trees. Martin likes to send visitors home with unmarked jars of fresh honey from a nearby apiary. We sat at a picnic table overlooking the meadow. In conversation, Martin is engaging and engaging. When I excused myself for putting on my sunglasses — the light suddenly changed — he grinned, “No, I like it. It’s kind of a flip of the script. We’ll talk about your album in a minute.” We were discussing the anxiety inherent in any romantic entanglement—the fear of needing someone. It’s an idea featured in “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” the first single from “Moon Music,” the band’s 10th single, which will be released in October. “I know it might seem like this / But I can’t stop / Let my defenses fall,” Martin sings in the opening verse.
“There are two methods that humans use to survive,” Martin said. “One is calcification and isolation and separation: my stuff, my tribe, this, and that. Then the other half is very open to everything. These people fall in love a lot more, but they also have a lot more heartbreak. I guessed he was in the latter camp,” he said. “I’m an extrovert.” Very, very ridiculous.” “But, if you’re not afraid of rejection, that’s the most liberating thing in the world.” Well, sure, but who isn’t afraid of rejection? “Of course,” Martin said, laughing. “That Telling someone you love them, releasing an album, writing a book, baking a cake, cooking a meal for your wife – it’s terrifying. But if I tell this person I love them and they don’t love me, I’m still giving them the gift of knowing that someone loves them. Martin noticed a slightly distressed look on my face. “I give this advice to myself too,” he added. “Don’t think I’ve got it right.”
Coldplay, founded in 1997 in London, has sold more than one hundred million records. (Along with Martin, the band includes guitarist Johnny Buckland, bassist Jay Berryman, and drummer Will Champion.) The ongoing tour of “Music of the Spheres,” the band’s previous release, sold ten million tickets and grossed nearly $1 billion, becoming a The highest-grossing rocker of the last 40 years. It has broken attendance records in countries including Romania, Singapore, Brazil, Colombia, Netherlands, Chile, Portugal, Sweden, France, Indonesia, Italy and Greece. (When I brought this up, Martin was quick to note how colonialism enabled him to achieve success: “We’re only able to play in so many countries because English-speaking people have done such terrible things all over the world.”)
“Moon Music” was produced by Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker behind twenty-seven singles. Martin described Max Martin’s style as “a combination of mathematics and fluidity, a completely real and open structure,” adding, with a kind of proud certainty, “He’s our product now.” Martin also confirmed that Coldplay will release two more albums and then stop recording, although the band will continue to tour. “Yesterday, I went to see the Los Angeles Philharmonic. All those songs were released two hundred years ago. “It still feels very fresh. So maybe we’ve reached a point where new material isn’t necessary to put on an amazing show.
Like many successful songwriters, Martin explains the work as a kind of divine guidance: a song appears and he receives it. “If you’re lucky enough to have a space that allows the music to speak to you and through you, you can relax a little bit,” he told me. “I just do what I’m told, the way an apple tree grows apples.” Creating Coldplay’s catalog as limited was liberating for the band, he said: “By knowing that there’s an endpoint, nobody’s phoning it in. We only have two more chances. And most of the songs are already there, in skeletal form. I asked him if that last day in the studio had It’s sad for him – a final shot, or the feeling of knowing that something is over. I told him I found ending things very painful, and I often preferred to go down with the ship. He gave me a sympathetic look and said, “I think it would be a nice feeling.”
At some point, I became Coldplay – how else do I say that? – Motivational. In recent years, they’ve sounded more like a band than an engine of relentless positivity, a high-quality confetti cannon aimed straight at the face. The shift began around 2014, with the release of “Ghost Stories,” which contained less malice or moodiness, fewer nods to Echo and the Bunnymen, and less acoustic guitar. Coldplay, once lambasted by detractors for excessive sadness and self-pity, were now broadcasting the opposite message: it’s all magic. It reminded me, indirectly, of “Attitude,” a one-minute track by punk band Bad Brains from 1982, in which singer HR barks, “Hey, we got PMA!”, a reference to “Positive Mind.” “Attitude,” a phrase coined in 1937 by author and would-be con man Napoleon Hill. He was promoting an idea that we today refer to as manifestation: “Whatever the human mind can believe, the human mind can achieve.” But bad minds still get angry, bitten and edged. For whatever reason, Coldplay have deliberately neutralized themselves.
In Malibu, when I asked Martin about this change – what exactly happened to the longing and discord of “Parachutes” or “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” the band’s first two releases? Interest in Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic, and his experience working with visionary electronic musician Brian Eno, who produced Coldplay’s fourth album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. Martin said that Eno’s purity and sense of wonder helped him “totally abandon the concept of trying to be cool. He came with a nine-year-old’s enthusiasm for everything.” Mostly, however, Martin sees the change as gradual and organic. “It wasn’t the same,” he said. If it was black and white, then it became colour.’ “The first song on the first album is called ‘Don’t Panic’. There’s also a song called “All’s Not Lost,” which is exactly the same message we’re singing now. It was just sung by someone a little younger, a little less experienced and a little more insecure.
Although he is unlikely to put it that way, Martin seems driven by a kind of professional mandate. It occupies a rarefied position, insofar as it can actually make the world less fractured, for a few hours, for seventy-five thousand people at a time. This requires erasing his ego, and accepting that a lot of people will find what he does, prancing around a stage covered in rainbows, singing lines like “In the end, it’s just love,” as he does on “One World,” which closes “Moon Music” — Insufferably corny. Somehow, messages have to be flat so they can be translated at scale. On “Clocks,” a lush, tumbling song from “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” Martin sings about his struggle with his fallibility and bewilderment, and about doing his best to be of service to the world: “Am I part of the world? Cure or am I part Of sickness? His voice faints, flutters, dissipates. “You are,” he answers. It’s a strange lyric, but I’ve always appreciated its strangeness: Cure, sickness, good, bad, and good you.
These days, Martin describes the band’s message as “no one is more or less special than anyone else.” He continued: “The reason I can say that is because we are one of the few groups of people who can actually see it. We travel everywhere. What Ryszard Kapuscinski calls the ‘other’ is not real. I asked him how it feels to stand on stage, for example Example, in Kuala Lumpur, or Helsinki, or Tokyo, and you hear the audience repeating his words to him, to each other, to themselves, and to the air: “It’s like: This is where humans work.” actually. It has nothing to do with us as a band. There are points where, hopefully, there’s nothing but “we’re all singing this together.” “
Ultimately, Martin hopes that by providing solace and a place of unification, Coldplay can bring about some change in the world. I thought this sounded perfect, even surreal, until I thought about all the ways songs had made me better. “If you are able to live as yourself and understand your identity, whatever that means in terms of your gender or your sexuality or what you like to eat or where you like to live or whether you like table tennis or donkey riding . . . if you are allowed Being yourself, would the world be as aggressive as it is now? “My feeling is no, I don’t think it will,” Martin asked. I believe that much of the violence and conflict comes from repression, repression, and harms that are not reported.
Eventually, the air began to cool. Martin brought me a sweatshirt. Our conversation turned toward more existential matters: the people we’d lost, what it meant, and what it didn’t mean. “Death is in our songs a lot,” Martin said. “Maybe as a way to encourage life. And also faith—the idea that it’s okay, everything’s okay, right? I’m sure that’s crossed your mind.” The sun began to dip toward the Pacific Ocean. We sat for a moment in the misty yellow dusk. The air was dry, salty, soft. “It’s all right, of course,” Martin said. “Everything is as it’s supposed to be.” ♦
