Coldplay: Day 18 and 19
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| Performing "Christmas Lights" at the BBC Top of the Pops Christmas Special 2010 |
Right now, I'm in a little bit of a lull for Coldplay music. In between 2008 and 2011, they didn't release very much, just some singles and a live album. Some of those singles were connected to the album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, and some were connected to their next album, Mylo Xyloto (pronounced "Zylohtoh") which would eventually release on October 24, 2011. Before we get to Album #5 though, I'm gonna jump around to a few different places in between those years.
On December 1, 2010, Coldplay released their greatest Christmas song: Christmas Lights. Christmas Lights is a piano ballad about a guy who goes out walking after a fight with his partner and sees the Christmas lights out on the streets. It includes some classically nonsensical Coldplay lines like, "Up above candles on air flicker / Oh, they flicker and they flow // And I'm up here holding onto // All those chandeliers of hope." I mean I couldn't tell you what a "candle on air" is, or what a "chandelier of hope" is. Regardless though, it's a good one. The song starts off slow, but the moment the second verse hits it just starts picking up momentum and cresting through its melodies. Then, it hits you with a tremendous drum-beat chorus that just keeps growing and growing. It's an incredibly emotional payoff for an emotional song, classic Coldplay style.
One line in particular in the song stands out to me now: "Oh, when you're still waiting for the snow to fall // It doesn't really feel like Christmas at all." This one stands out for rather sad reasons, as in Utah, we've had less and less snowy Christmases as the years have gone on. I'm not particularly interested in climate alarmism or doomsday talk, but decreasing snowfall is a pain point every Spring as Utah evaluates its precarious water resources. It feels to me that every year it's a little hotter in November and March than the year before. Climate aside, it's just a very on-point song lyric, at least in my world, since I feel like it's basically something that gets said every year by me or someone else in my family when we're looking out the window at the gray grass on December 24.
One last thing about this song goes back once again to my mission. It's weird that I've already brought up my mission several times on this blog. Of all the times in my life to connect to a pop band, you'd think my mission would be the last, but here we are. As it goes, anyone who served a mission knows that missionaries like to pass around music and media between each other. In my mission, with smartphones, we used Google Drive. I know before smartphones people used USBs, and before that they probably used CDs. Christmas Lights was one song that I had passed to me early in my mission, and I enjoyed it for a long time, especially during Christmas season. All things considered, it's a relatively appropriate missionary song, themed around Christmas. Of course, there were not-so mission appropriate songs that would get passed around as well.
The culture of music on missions is a funny thing. I'm honestly not sure what the current missionary handbook says about music, but the old White Handbook said that music had to invite the Spirit in order to be approved. Naturally this is very much open to interpretation. I think most missions generally stuck to anything Christian as a baseline, but in both missions in which I served (one temporary, one main), there were incidents in which mission presidents tightened music rules due to missionaries "pushing the boundaries" so to speak (for example, missionaries listening to Kanye West's "Christian" albums). In my main mission, after over a year-and-a-half without any clear music rules, my mission president eventually banned any music that wasn't explicitly found in the Church Hymnbook (this meant that it could be any style or arrangement of a hymn, as long as it was a hymn), or from the Tabernacle Choir.
It was at this point that I deleted Christmas Lights and many other songs off my phone. I was pretty sad about this, since music was one of the few pleasures I enjoyed on the mission, and I also had a few of those not-so mission appropriate songs hehe. My favorite had been the Chinese pop music. I usually felt bad if I had any regular English pop songs on my phone, but for some reason, having a language barrier made it not feel like breaking the rules. Although I up and deleted them all, after my mission I went and found a bunch of the songs that I had liked and made a playlist that I still have today.
So that's the tale of me and Christmas Lights. Revisiting it for the first time after my mission felt like seeing an old friend again, and it remains one of my favorite Christmas songs ever.
Oh, and it's a pretty popular song to be covered. On this Wikipedia page List of cover versions of Coldplay songs (I don't know why this exists), there are six(!) different cover versions of Christmas Lights. For those of you (Ethan) who know the band Valley, I checked out their cover version and it's decent.
Other than Christmas Lights and one big project, all the songs released in this time frame were singles connected to Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends.
These songs were:
- Death Will Never Conquer - Viva La Vida single release B-side (May 25, 2008)
- Lost?, "Lost@ - Live at the United Center, Chicago, IL", and Lost+ (with Jay-Z) - B-sides for the Lost! single release (November 10, 2008)
- "Life in Technicolor ii - Live at the O2, London", The Goldrush - B-sides for the Life in Technicolor ii single release (February 2, 2009)
- Strawberry Swing - Single release (September 14, 2009)
Death Will Never Conquer and The Goldrush are both rather unique little tracks. I was trying to think about how to describe Death Will Never Conquer and I couldn't quite figure it out, it's got this sort of classic, romp vibe, I could maybe imagine it being played in a saloon in the Wild West. One website called it a "jaunty piano ditty," and clocking in at 1:17, it has to be one of their shortest songs (1). The Goldrush is another stylistic departure, a bouncy little folk-rock, indie-rock song that really tickled my brain reminding me of something. The best I could come up with though was Coeur D'Alene by The Head and the Heart, or maybe The Decemberists. You tell me if you think they're similar.
The weirdest thing about this song is that the vocals are not from Chris Martin, the singer is the drummer, Will Champion. Coldplay played around a little bit with different singers around this time. Another example is that in the live performances of Death Will Never Conquer they would have Will perform the lead vocals. The studio version is unchanged though.
In 2009, Coldplay released the "big" project I mentioned earlier, a live album called LeftRightLeftRightLeft (Live). I wrote somewhat extensively about live albums a few posts ago and I don't have too much to add to it. I think that I'm enjoying live albums more now since I wrote that post since I'm actually giving them a chance. A couple things about this album are that Coldplay released it for free as a sort of thank-you to the fans, and that they intended it to be viewed as more than just a live album, saying, "Although it's live, it's supposed to be a real album, part of our canon." (2) To be honest, I'm not really sure what they meant by that. At the end of the day, it's a live album, no original songs on it. Also they didn't treat it like part of their "canon," since it was unavailable on streaming services until just 5 years ago (2). I suppose you could view the performances on the album as sort of "separate" from the studio recordings, taking them as a whole new version, rather than just a live version of the studio song. That's kind of interesting and maybe what they intended by that statement.
The track listing of LeftRightLeftRightLeft (Live) is this:
1. Glass of Water
2. 42
3. Clocks
4. Strawberry Swing
5. The Hardest Part/Postcards from Far Away
6. Viva La Vida
7. Death Will Never Conquer
8. Fix You
9. Death and All His Friends
The recordings are actually not all from one concert, but split up between three different shows, two in 2008, and one in 2009.
This track list is pretty awesome. If you happen to remember, almost every song here is one that I highlighted myself as a favorite, with the exception of 42 and Death Will Never Conquer. I guess I'm just on the same wavelength as the band because it seems like we have similar taste (of course these are also most of the popular ones so it's not like I'm special for thinking that).
I've really been enjoying this recording of Glass of Water, it's just got a lot of energy. Like I mentioned earlier, Death Will Never Conquer features Will Champion on the lead vocals since it's a live recording.
Overall, this album was well received. Pitchfork compared it favorably to Live 2003, their previous live effort, and even said that it's high enough quality they should probably be charging money for it. There's a funny moment in the song The Hardest Part/Postcards from Far Away where you can hear a woman shouting the words out with her voice half-gone. I didn't notice it at first, but Pitchfork and someone on Reddit both talked about it so I thought I would mention it too.
With this well-received live album, and while still riding high off the critical and commercial success of Viva La Vida and Death and All His Friends, Coldplay was about as on top of the world as they would ever get. Even Pitchfork, the snobbiest of snobs admitted, "LRLRL sounds like the band finally coming into its own." With Viva La Vida and LRLRL Coldplay had proved themselves, successfully combining experimentation with sentimentality, live performance with studio wizardry.
From this point on, Coldplay would enter uncharted waters. Over the next 15 years, they would re-invent themselves constantly, reaching popular heights no other band has matched in the 21st century. Unfortunately, the critics would not be along for the ride; no Coldplay album has been received as well as Viva La Vida, and some have even been quite poorly received. Through it all though, even in times when they barely even resembled themselves sonically, Coldplay has remained true to who they are. And whether through some pop music or marketing genius, authenticity, or simple luck of the draw, they've succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
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| As of 3/29/26, Coldplay is Spotify's 8th most listened to artist in the world |
Viva la Vida, Death Will Never Conquer - June 12, 2008 (May 25, 2008)
Lost!, Lost?, "Lost@ - Live at the United Center, Chicago, IL", Lost+ (with Jay-Z) - November 7, 2008
Life in Technicolor ii, "Life in Technicolor ii - Live at the O2, London", The Goldrush - January 30, 2009
LeftRightLeftRightLeft (Live) - May 15, 2009
Strawberry Swing - September 13, 2009
Christmas Lights - December 1, 2010
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