Coldplay: Day 15b

Okay so out of the 13 songs on X&Y, there were only four that I knew before starting this project. Those four were pretty much the most well-known of the album: Fix You, Talk, Speed of Sound, and Til Kingdom Come. I already talked about Speed of Sound in a previous post (Day 13, which was technically the first one I wrote). Like I mentioned, that one was my favorite Coldplay song for several years. Something funny about that song is that the band doesn't actually like it. They often refuse to play it in shows and said it was one of their least favorite songs in an interview. According to them, they "never got it right."

Funnily enough, in the very same interview, another one of these four songs was also cited as one of their least favorites: Talk. In this case it's apparently just because the bassist (Guy Berryman) doesn't like playing it. I have fond memories of this song, not because I especially love it, but because it reminds me of my brother. Lots of Coldplay songs and other music remind me of my siblings in general, but for some reason I've always associated this song with him. Obviously the lyrics could have played a part, as he is seemingly addressing his brother in the song, but I also just always thought that he was the first person to "discover" this song and the one who bought it on iTunes (my siblings and I would always get iTunes gift cards for birthday and Christmas gifts and share the music with each other). I was talking to him about this album the other day and I don't think we really know who found the song first, but that's just how I remember it. Either way though, I've always thought the song was decent, and my opinion hasn't really changed in 13-ish years.

The real monster on this album is Fix You. There are a lot of things I want to talk about with this song, but first and foremost, Chris Martin said it actually saved the band. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Chris Martin was talking about the time period of the album X&Y and had this to say about Fix You:

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.

I didn't know before seeing this that the band felt that way about the album X&Y. In a way it makes sense to me because I think the album is weaker overall than the previous two. It's not a bad album exactly, but it just feels less distinct and memorable than the other two. It's interesting though to see how close Coldplay once came to ending their career, only a few years after it began, and even after finding huge success. It's cool that they had this song to carry them through that hard time.

I think that the circumstances of the song can definitely be felt in it, because this song has provided a similar emotional power to many thousands and millions of people since it was created. In 2017, Coldplay was one of several artists who performed at the One Love Manchester benefit concert, which was organized by Ariana Grande and others to support the victims of the bombing at her concert two weeks before. Although they only played three songs in the set, one of them was Fix You. In 2022, Camila Cabello performed a benefit concert for the victims of the Ukraine-Russia war and covered Fix You as part of her setlist.

The song continues to have enduring popularity: the music video for the song has 696 million views, but even more notably, live performances of the song from just within the last few years have picked up tens of millions of views. Just last year, British artist Jacob Collier performed the song (guest starring Chris Martin) at his own concert and just looking at the crowd you can see that everyone knows the song, even though it's from a band they weren't even there to see (Jacob Collier & Chris Martin - Fix You (Live from the O2 Arena). In 2024, Rolling Stone ranked Fix You as the 392nd greatest song of all time.

Something funny about this song is that it made its way into my life in a couple of really random ways throughout my childhood and young adulthood. When I was a kid, my older sister was really into dancing and so she had ballet and other dance shows that we would go to as a family. I don't remember many details about most of these shows, but my sister and I had a joke over Fix You because it kept getting chosen as a backing track for dances and I thought it was so annoying. I don't think I'd ever heard the song before hearing it at her shows and I thought it was so sappy and overly serious (I was probably like 10 or 11). For years I would reference it as the song that was always chosen for the dances (even though it was probably only a couple of times), and my sister ended up jokingly putting it on a playlist of my favorite songs she made for me for Christmas one year. It's funny that years later I would end up just liking the song for what it is and kind of forgetting about the joke.

The other random time I crossed paths with this song was actually in a church setting. When I was a missionary, and I couldn't watch any movies or other things, I watched a church video series where they feature different individuals and their stories of addiction. In one of the videos, the most random thing happens where the main character is in the shower and he starts listening to what is apparently Fix You by Coldplay. When he hears the lyrics, "Lights will guide you home // And ignite your bones // And I will try to fix you," he just feels "the Spirit hit him," and is inspired to change his life and overcome his addiction. For me, I think it's kind of funny to find a Coldplay song in a church video about addiction of all things. And as a missionary at the time, it was fun to see a song I knew get randomly referenced, especially since I couldn't listen to most music at the time. Along with this though, I think the story is another example of the emotional power of this song. Similar to how the song lifted up the band themselves, and comforted people after tragic events, here it inspired an individual to change their life. Here's the video in case you're curious.

I should probably be done talking about Fix You by now, but somehow I'm not. In an earlier post, I wrote a little bit about the phenomenon of Coldplay Hate, where the band is looked down on as dorky, empty, commercial, or somehow embodying what's wrong with music. While I mentioned before this isn't universal (I wasn't aware of Coldplay being viewed like this growing up), it's prevalent enough that it can be seen in media. A movie scene that made me think of this whole thing is from the movie Yesterday (2019), which is a movie about a man who wakes up in a world where the Beatles never existed. He is a musician and a huge Beatles fan, so he begins performing their songs as his own and becomes famous as a result. The scene in question is toward the beginning of the movie when the main character discovers his friends don't know the Beatles. Yesterday (2019) - Playing Yesterday Scene (1/10) | Movieclips. It's not a long clip, so check it out, or at least watch it from 2:15 to see the part where Coldplay gets mentioned. As you can see from the clip, Coldplay, and specifically Fix You, is used as a quick punching bag, the epitome of a not well-written song (in the writer's view, at least) to contrast with "actual" good music like the Beatles. There are other examples of Coldplay being mentioned in things that I won't get into here, I just thought it was interesting to see how the song Fix You specifically was used to take shots at Coldplay in general.

Well that's pretty much it for Fix You. One last word about it is just how it's interesting that this song can kind of encapsulate both the praises and criticisms of Coldplay all by itself. It's an emotional, sappy, and maybe even cringe song when viewed from one perspective, but from another, it's a beautiful, uplifting, and powerful song. One way of viewing Coldplay's music (and the idea of "Coldplay Hate") is to view it through this dichotomy of how much you enjoy it is dependent on how much you let yourself enjoy it. This isn't really my idea, but from Daniel Parris on Substack who wrote a really interesting article touching on this idea. It's a really well-written article, honestly probably better than I could do, but I'll talk more about it another time when I do a more complete look into the idea of "Coldplay Hate."

Last but not least for this long post that has taken me way too long to write: Til Kingdom Come, the final song on the album. I mainly just wanted to include this one so I could do a very specific shout-out.  My high school buddy (shout-out Mitchell) once told me that this song was him and his then-girlfriend's couple song and for whatever reason that has stuck with me for like 9 years. I do like the song though, it's a bit different than a lot of their other music (at least up to that point), and I enjoy the lyrics and feeling I get when listening to it.