On a recent afternoon in Malibu, Chris Martin, the front man of Coldplay, was enjoying a brief pause between tour dates. “We have breaks, but only in the way that Serena Williams has a banana between sets,” he said, pulling his bare feet up under him. Martin, who is forty-seven, was wearing an emerald-green sweater featuring a picture of the earth, affixed with a tiny white button that said “LOVE.” Later on, when he took the sweater off, he revealed a blue T-shirt with the same button. I wondered, but did not ask, how many of them he owned. It felt indicative of Martin’s quintessence at this particular moment: LOVE, layered ad infinitum.
Martin was in the midst of converting an old property into a studio and the de-facto Coldplay HQ. The complex was beset by scrubby clay slopes dotted with sagebrush, California aster, evergreen oaks. Martin likes to send visitors home with unlabelled jars of fresh honey from an apiary nearby. We sat at a picnic table overlooking a meadow. In conversation, Martin is engaging, magnetic. When I apologized for putting my sunglasses on—the light had suddenly shifted—he grinned: “No, I love it. It sort of flips the script. We’ll talk about your album in a minute.” We’d been discussing the gurgling anxiety inherent to any romantic entanglement—the fear of starting to need someone. It’s an idea that arises in “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” the swooning first single from “Moon Music,” the band’s tenth record, which comes out in October. “I know that this could feel like that / But I just can’t stop / Let my defenses drop,” Martin sings in the opening verse.
“There are two methods that humans use to survive,” Martin said. “One is calcification and sequestering and separating: my stuff, my tribe, my this, my that. And then the other half is so open to everything. Those people fall in love a lot more, but they also have a lot more heartbreak.” I guessed that he was in the latter camp. “I’m so open it’s ridiculous,” he said. “But, if you’re not afraid of rejection, it’s the most liberating thing in the world.” Well, sure—but who’s not afraid of rejection? “Of course,” Martin said, laughing. “To tell someone you love them, or to release an album, or to write a book, or to make a cake, or to cook your wife a meal—it’s terrifying. But if I tell this person I love them and they don’t love me back, I still gave them the gift of knowing someone loves them.” Martin noticed a slightly stricken look on my face. “I’m giving this advice to myself, too,” he added. “Don’t think I’ve got it mastered.”
Coldplay, which formed in 1997, in London, has sold more than a hundred million records. (Besides Martin, the band includes the guitarist Jonny Buckland, the bassist Guy Berryman, and the drummer Will Champion.) The ongoing tour for “Music of the Spheres,” the band’s prior release, has sold ten million tickets and made close to a billion dollars, becoming the highest-grossing rock tour of the past forty years. It has broken attendance records in countries including Romania, Singapore, Brazil, Colombia, the Netherlands, Chile, Portugal, Sweden, France, Indonesia, Italy, and Greece. (When I brought this up, Martin was quick to note how colonialism has enabled his success: “We’re only able to play in so many countries because people who spoke English did such terrible things all around the world.”)
“Moon Music” was produced by Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker behind twenty-seven No. 1 singles. Martin described Max Martin’s technique as “a mix of mathematics and fluidity, of real structure and being totally open,” adding, with a kind of proud certainty, “He’s our producer now.” Martin also confirmed that Coldplay will make two more albums and then stop recording, though the band will continue to tour. “Yesterday, I went to see the L.A. Philharmonic. All those songs were released two hundred years ago,” he said. “It still felt extremely vibrant. So perhaps there’s a point where new material is not essential to make an amazing show.”
Martin, like many successful songwriters, explains the work as a kind of divine channelling: a song appears and he receives it. “If you’re lucky enough to have the space to let the music talk to you, and through you, then you can relax a bit,” he told me. “I’m just sort of doing what I’m told, the way an apple tree grows apples.” He said that establishing the Coldplay catalogue as finite has been liberating for the band: “By knowing there’s an end point, nobody is phoning it in. We only have two more chances. And most of the songs already exist, in a skeletal form.” I asked if that last day in the studio might be sad for him—a final take, the feeling of knowing that something is over. I find ending things so excruciating, I told him, I’d often rather just go down with the ship. He gave me a sympathetic look. “I think it will feel amazing,” he said.
At some point, Coldplay became—how else do I say it?—motivational. In recent years, it has felt less like a band than like an engine of unrelenting positivity, a high-grade confetti cannon straight to the face. The shift started around 2014, with the release of “Ghost Stories,” which contained little rancor or moodiness, fewer nods to Echo and the Bunnymen, less audible guitar. Coldplay, once skewered by critics for being too plaintive and self-pitying, was now broadcasting the opposite message: everything is magic. It reminded me, in some circuitous way, of “Attitude,” the punk band Bad Brains’ one-minute opus from 1982, in which the vocalist H.R. barks, “Hey, we got that P.M.A.!”—a reference to “positive mental attitude,” a phrase coined in 1937 by the author and probable con man Napoleon Hill. He was peddling a notion that we today refer to as manifestation: “Anything the human mind can believe, the human mind can achieve.” But Bad Brains still had fury, bite, edge. For whatever reason, Coldplay had willfully neutralized itself.
In Malibu, when I needled Martin about that change—what happened, exactly, to the yearning and discord of “Parachutes” or “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” the band’s first two releases?—he attributed it both to a burgeoning interest in Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, and to his experience working with the visionary electronic musician Brian Eno, who produced “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends,” Coldplay’s fourth album. Martin said that Eno’s purity and sense of wonder had helped him “completely abandon the concept of trying to be cool. He came in with the enthusiasm of a nine-year-old for everything.” Mostly, though, Martin sees the change as incremental, organic. “It’s not like it was black-and-white, and then became color,” he said. “The first song on the first album is called ‘Don’t Panic.’ There’s also a song called ‘Everything’s Not Lost,’ which is exactly the same message that we’re singing now. Just sung by a slightly less experienced, more insecure, younger person.”
Though he likely wouldn’t frame it this way, Martin appears motivated by a kind of vocational mandate. He occupies a rarefied position, insofar as it’s actually possible for him to make the world a little less fractured, for a couple of hours, seventy-five thousand people at a time. This requires obliterating his ego, and accepting that a lot of people will find what he’s doing—bouncing around a stage covered with rainbows, singing lines such as “In the end it’s just love,” as he does on “One World,” which closes “Moon Music”—unbearably corny. In a way, the messaging has to be flat to translate so widely. On “Clocks,” a lush and tumbling track from “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” Martin sings about grappling with his own fallibility and bafflement, of trying his best to be of service in the world: “Am I part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?” His voice swoons, flutters, dissipates. “You are,” he answers. It’s a strange lyric, but I’ve always appreciated its strangeness: cure, disease, good, bad, hurtful, benevolent. You are.
These days, Martin describes the band’s message as “No one is more or less special than anyone else.” He went on, “The reason I’m able to say that is because we’re one of the few groups of people who get to actually see it. We travel everywhere. What Ryszard Kapuściński would call ‘the Other’ is not real.” I asked him what it felt like to stand onstage in, say, Kuala Lumpur, or Helsinki, or Tokyo, and hear the crowd bellowing his lyrics back to him, to one another, to themselves, to the air. “It feels like the answer,” he said. “It feels like: This is where humans actually work. It has nothing to do with us as a band. There are points where, hopefully, nothing exists except ‘We’re all just singing this together.’ ”
Ultimately, Martin hopes that by providing solace, and a place to unify, Coldplay can actualize some change in the world. I thought this sounded idealistic, even quixotic, until I considered all the ways in which I had been made better by songs. “If you’re able to live as yourself and understand who you are, whatever that might mean in terms of your gender or sexuality or what you like to eat or where you like to live or whether you like table tennis or riding donkeys . . . if you’re allowed to be yourself, would the world be as aggressive as it is?” Martin asked. “My feeling is no, I don’t think it would. I think much of the violence and conflict comes from repression, suppression, unreleased damage.”
Eventually, the air started to cool. Martin brought me a sweatshirt. Our conversation wound toward more existential matters: people we’d lost, what it meant, what it didn’t mean. “Death is in our songs a lot,” Martin said. “Maybe as a way of encouraging living. And also faith—the idea that, well, it’s O.K. It’s all O.K., isn’t it? I’m sure that’s crossed your mind.” The sun was beginning to ease into the Pacific. We sat for a moment in the hazy yellow pre-dusk. The air was parched, salty, soft. “Everything is perfect, of course,” Martin said. “Everything’s as it’s supposed to be.” ♦
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