Coldplay's self-help pop | The New Yorker

On a recent afternoon in Malibu, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin was enjoying a quick break 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 underneath him. Martin, who is forty-seven, wore an emerald green sweater with a picture of the Earth and a small white button that read:LOVE.” When he later took off the sweater, he revealed a blue T-shirt with the same button. I wondered, but didn't ask, how many of them he owned. It felt telling of Martin's bottom line at this particular moment: LOVElayered to infinity.

Martin was in the process of converting an old property into a studio and Coldplay's actual headquarters. The complex was surrounded by scrubby clay slopes dotted with sagebrush, California asters, and evergreen oaks. Martin likes to send visitors home with unlabeled jars of fresh honey from a nearby apiary. We sat at a picnic table overlooking a meadow. In conversation, Martin is captivating and attractive. When I apologized for putting on my sunglasses—the light had suddenly changed—he grinned, “No, I love it. It kind of flips the script. We're talking about your album in a moment.” We'd been talking about the gurgling fear inherent in every romantic entanglement – the fear of needing someone. This idea emerges in “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” the stunning first single from “Moon Music,” the band’s tenth album, due out in October. “I know it might feel like this / But I just can’t stop / Let my defenses down,” Martin sings in the opening verse.

“There are two ways people survive,” Martin said. “One is calcification and sequestration and separation: my things, my tribe, my this, my that. And then the other half is so open to everything. These people fall in love a lot more, but they also have a lot more heartache.” I suspected 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.” Sure – but who isn't afraid of rejection? “Of course,” Martin said, laughing. “Telling someone you love them, releasing an album, writing a book, baking a cake or cooking a meal for your wife – that's terrifying. But if I tell that person I love them and they don't love me back, I'm still giving them the gift of knowing that someone loves them.” Martin noticed a slightly saddened look on my face. “I give this advice to myself too,” he added. “I don’t think I have it under control.”

Coldplay was founded in London in 1997 and has sold more than a hundred million records. (In addition to Martin, the band includes guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion.) The ongoing tour for “Music of the Spheres,” the band's previous release, has sold ten million tickets and sold nearly a million billion dollars and became the highest-grossing rock tour of the last forty years. Visitor records were broken in countries such as 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 enabled his success: “We can only play in so many countries because people who spoke English did such terrible things all over the world.”)

“Moon Music” was produced by Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker behind 27 No. 1 singles. Martin described Max Martin's technique as “a mixture of mathematics and fluidity, of real structure and complete openness,” adding with a kind of proud certainty, “He's our producer now.” Martin also confirmed that Coldplay are making two more albums and then The recordings will stop, but the band will continue to tour. “Yesterday I went to see the LA Philharmonic. All these songs were published two hundred years ago,” he said. “It still felt extremely alive. So maybe there’s a point where new material isn’t absolutely necessary to make a great show.”

Martin, like many successful songwriters, explains the work as a kind of divine channeling: a song appears and he receives it. “If you're lucky enough to have the space where the music can speak to you and through you, then you can relax a little bit,” he told me. “I just do what I'm told, like an apple tree grows apples.” He said that establishing the Coldplay catalog as finite was liberating for the band: “When you know there's an end point no one calls him. We only have two chances left.” And most of the songs already exist in skeleton form.” I asked if this last day in the studio could be sad for him – a final shot, the feeling of knowing something is over. I find it so painful to end things, I told him, that often I would rather just go down with the ship. He gave me a sympathetic look. “I think it’s going to feel great,” he said.

At some point Coldplay became – how else should I put it? –motivating. In recent years, it's felt less like a band and more like an engine of relentless positivity, a high-quality confetti cannon straight to your face. The shift began around 2014 with the release of Ghost Stories, which contained little rancor or moodiness, fewer references to Echo and the Bunnymen, and fewer audible guitar tones. Coldplay, once criticized by critics as too plaintive and self-pitying, now spread the opposite message: Everything is magical. It reminded me, in a roundabout way, of “Attitude,” the one-minute 1982 opus by punk band Bad Brains, in which singer HR barks, “Hey, we got that PMA!”—a reference to “positive mental.” Attitude,” a phrase coined in 1937 by author and alleged fraudster Napoleon Hill. He espoused an idea we now call manifestation: “Anything the human mind can believe, the human mind can achieve.” But Bad Brains still had anger, bite and edge. For some reason, Coldplay had deliberately neutralized themselves.

When I asked Martin in Malibu about this change – what exactly happened to the longing and conflict of “Parachutes” or “A Rush of Blood to the Head”, the band's first two releases? – he attributed both to a surge of interest in Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic, and his experience working with the visionary electronic musician Brian Eno, of “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.” Coldplay's fourth album. Martin said that Eno's purity and sense of wonder helped him “totally abandon the concept of trying to be cool. He came to everything with a nine-year-old's enthusiasm.” For the most part, however, Martin sees the change as incremental and organic. “It's not like it was black and white and then turned to 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” that has the exact same message that we're singing now. Just sung by a slightly less experienced, more insecure, younger person.”

Although he probably wouldn't put it that way, Martin seems motivated by some kind of professional mission. It occupies a special position in that it is actually able to make the world a little less fragmented for a few hours and 75,000 people at once. To do this, he has to erase his ego and accept that a lot of people will like what he's doing – jumping around on a stage covered in rainbows and singing lines like “In the end it's just love,” like he does on “One World” “Moon Music” concludes – unbearably cheesy. In a sense, the message has to be flat to be translated so comprehensively. In “Clocks,” a lush and tumultuous track from “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” Martin sings about coming to terms with his own fallibility and confusion and doing his best to serve the world: “Am I part of the.” Cure, or am I part of the disease?” His voice faints, flutters, dissolves. “You are,” he replies. It's a strange text, but I've always appreciated its strangeness: healing, illness, 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 continued: “The reason I can say that is because we're one of the few groups of people who actually see it can. We travel everywhere. What Ryszard Kapuściński would call “the other” is not real.” I asked him how it felt to be on stage in, for example, Kuala Lumpur, Helsinki or Tokyo and hear the crowd listening to him, each other, themselves himself and shouted his lyrics to the air. “It feels like the answer,” he said. “It feels like: People actually work here. It has nothing to do with us as a band. There are points where hopefully nothing exists other than “We’re all singing this together.” ”

Ultimately, Martin hopes that Coldplay can bring about some change in the world by providing comfort and a place of unification. I thought that sounded idealistic, even quixotic, until I thought about the ways in which songs had made me better. “When you are able to live as yourself and understand who you are, whatever that may mean 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 ride a donkey. . . If you were allowed to be yourself, would the world be as aggressive as it is?” asked Martin. “My feeling is no, I don’t think that would be the case. I think a lot of the violence and conflict comes from oppression, repression and unpublished harm.”

Eventually the air began to cool. Martin brought me a sweatshirt. Our conversation turned to more existential topics: people we had lost, what that meant and what it didn't mean. “Death plays a big role in our songs,” Martin said. “Perhaps to promote life. And also faith – the idea that everything is okay, right? I'm sure that's crossed your mind.” The sun began to slowly sink into the Pacific. We sat for a moment in the hazy yellow predawn. The air was parched, salty and soft. “Of course everything is perfect,” said Martin. “Everything is as it should be.” ♦