Well at Least I Have Coldplay

Coldplay was my favorite act of the 00s when I was living through the 00s. Though in all honesty Britney Spears was probably my favorite artist of the 2000s, but I tried hiding that for a while, plus her first album came out in early 1999 so she still felt connected to the 90s. Coldplay on the other hand was a band that fit in nicely with my new image and taste for all things Rock and Alternative and I could point to them first whenever people asked me who my favorite modern act was during the 00s. In a lot of ways though Coldplay became my favorite band of the 00s more by default because as I have said earlier a lot of the music in the 00s had little appeal to me. So, when I found a "newer" act I actually liked I usually hyped them up more than they arguably deserved. Here's the thing while I liked older music more during the ‘00s I still really wanted to like new music. Liking music as it comes out in a lot of ways is more fun and exciting than discovering music from the past. Granted I love music from the past (and still do) and discovering older music and having it connect me to the zeitgeist of the times still fascinates me endlessly, but it's also pretty solitary for the most part. Liking new music makes you feel part of the conversation and more connected with those around you. This is honestly why I think pop music has such a pull on people, because it helps you to connect with the world around you, especially your own peers.

Of course, being gay and struggling in the closet meant I felt disconnected from those around me and that made me pretty melancholy, but I still yearned for connection even as I was hiding in the closet. Coldplay was another win/win because their music was not only atmospheric & sad, therefore reflecting my general mood during high school, but at the same time everyone listened to Coldplay during the 00s. Coldplay's music felt a piece with the 90s Alternative I liked in terms of mood and the message, yet they were a band that helped connect me more to my peers and casual music fans who just liked whatever was on the radio at that given moment.

In a lot of ways, I kind of stumbled into Coldplay fandom. When they first came out their big single was Yellow off their 2000 album parachutes. I remember the music video with Chris Martin walking along a rainy beach being played all the time on MTV in early 2001 and honestly I was pretty indifferent to it. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't terribly exciting either since I was still much more hooked on my pop girls at that time. Throughout the rest of 2001 Coldplay built up a sizable audience in America and the second single Trouble did pretty well and I remember liking it a bit more due to the piano on it. Still at that point Coldplay was pleasant background noise more than anything.

Now a lot happened to my taste in music inbetween the release of Parachutes in late 2000 and their follow-up album A Rush of Blood to the Head in late 2002. I went from a Teen Pop/Pop Diva loving gay boy to a Classic Rock/Grunge obsessed teen who was carrying around a lot more angst at the time. This is something I try to remember now as an adult, because as I get older the difference in years for pop music doesn't seem that big anymore like it used to, but for kids growing up in middle school and high school, every year can feel like a watershed moment for music. I actually don't remember hearing or seeing the music video for the first single off Rush of Blood to the Head, In My Place. What I remember was seeing the music video for Clocks in early 2003 on VH1's Top 20 countdown. The atmosphere, the production, the melody, that moody blue and red lighting in the music video caught my attention. This was the first time a new song by a relative new (aka post 90s) act had a song that was really speaking to me since I had transitioned to Grunge and Classic Rock in late 2001/early 2002.

Now I was listening to the radio not to just hear the old stuff but to maybe hear that new atmospheric piano song again. For my birthday a friend from high school made me a copy of Rush of Blood to the Head, which was very nice of him. Though I must point out he obviously got it from a torrent at the time because it had those scratches and blips that were pretty prevalent with file sharing back then. So for years whenever I listened to Clocks it had a few hiccups at the beginning that I just got so used to that now whenever I hear the song on streaming or the radio it's kind of jarring for it to sound perfect to my ears! I remember making the timeline mix tapes and having Clocks be the end point or putting Clocks on tapes of mostly 90s Alternative during high school as well. Along with Porcupine Tree, who I discovered a few months later during the summer of 2003, Coldplay kept me tethered to modern music during my late high school years.

For a while Clocks was the only song I had latched on to on that album though. I didn't dive in all the way like I had been doing with my 90s Rock CDs at the time. I also remember EVERY girl I knew loving the 3rd single The Scientist. For me it was like Yellow, it was pleasant enough but it didn't grab me the way Clocks did. Now that all started to change my freshmen year of College. It was around that time that I started listening to Rush of Blood to the Head more and more as an album. At that point a lot of songs started clicking with me including Daylight, God Put a Smile on Your Face, and especially Warning Sign which should have been a single as it's one of the best songs of the 00s. That album was also great for when I was studying or typing up papers in my dorm during freshmen year as well.

All this is to say is that I had moved beyond just liking Clocks to becoming a full-fledged Coldplay fan by late 2004 and in early 2005. I was pumped and ready for the next Coldplay album which was to be called X&Y and would drop sometime during the summer. Now in 2005 this was before we had YouTube and I didn't have iTunes or an iPod until the end of the year so I was still pretty dependent on radio at that time to hear new music first (MTV I had fully given up on by this point.) That's the thing I feel people forget about now, but in the era before streaming & YouTube but after MTV and even Vh1 phased out most of their music programming, radio was really the only outlet we all had again for new music. Even then the radio playlists were getting stricter and more repetitive during the early to mid ‘00s.

Nonetheless radio was where it was at still in 2005 for new music and I want to say that the first time I heard the first single off X&Y, The Speed of Sound, in 2005 was on the radio at work. You see I used to work at the restaurant Fathoms in the Newport Marriott between 2002-2010. I was a part timer on pool status so whenever I came home from college, I could go back to work which was great! I always had reliable income throughout college because of it without having to work when I was at school studying. Back to Fathoms though, the kitchen area always had the radio on and when I think back to a lot of music from the ‘00s I think of that kitchen because I heard a lot of music through that kitchen radio.

I remember LOVING Speed of Sound as soon as I heard it. I wanted the band to capitalize on Clocks and that's exactly what they did on Speed of Sound, which quickly became my second favorite Coldplay song ever and my brother's favorite Coldplay period. It was around that time that my younger brother Wes started coming around to more 90s Alternative and Alternative Rock that I really liked. He would soon be delving into 311, Tool, Alice in Chains, the Beastie Boys, Audioslave and more. The day X&Y got released my grandparents were visiting and they took to me to Costco, which is where I bought the album. I remember they let me listen to it in the car as soon as I bought it.

X&Y was where I wanted Coldplay to go next because it ramped up the atmospheric production of Clocks to 11 and that production defined the sound of that album completely. I remember liking Talk the most after a few listens and hoping it would be a single and eventually Talk was released as the 3rd single off X&Y. That summer I was also very busy. I worked full time at Marriott and I was taking summer classes for Spanish at URI. So basically, I was driving around the entire state of Rhode Island every day, but that meant I was listening to a lot of music in the car and X&Y reminds me of that summer as a result. I also remember talking with guy at my Spanish class who also liked Coldplay and he really loved Britpop as well. Soon after I started getting into a lot of 90s Britpop and buying albums by Blur, Pulp, Suede and The Stone Roses that summer year as well. With X&Y Coldplay felt like they were becoming one of my favorite acts even though they still couldn't quite compete with my top tier 90s bands like Stone Temple Pilots or Alice in Chains. Still Coldplay had a #1 album now and one of my favorite acts was the biggest band in the world at that juncture, which I had not experienced in a while.

By the time 2008 rolled around I was finishing up college and I remember hearing the new song by Coldplay for their upcoming 4th album. Violet Hill definitely felt like a departure for them as they leaned into hard rock for the first time. I was intrigued and I appreciated them trying to do something different. Still while I do love crunchy hard rock, it felt like an awkward fit for Coldplay. I remember most people were left a little confused by Violet Hill and I think the band realized this since they went ahead and released Viva La Vida as the next single before the album dropped. Nowadays releasing 2,3 even 5 songs before your album drops is common practice in the age of streaming, but back then it was pretty rare still to see 2 singles drop before the album was officially released.

Releasing Viva La Vida as the next single was exactly what the doctor ordered though, because it then shot straight to #1 on the Pop charts which a rock song had not done since 2001. Granted it was a very "poppy" rock song, but it also proved how huge Coldplay had become. Looking back, this feels like their peak in terms of popularity and mass appeal. Coldplay was able to galvanize the disparate niches of music listening audiences under one umbrella for a brief moment in 2008. From the young kids in middle school who listened to top 40, to the cool teens and young adults who listened to indie and alternative rock, to middle age folks who listened to light rock and classic rock, to even some of the people who listened to Hip-Hop and RnB, Coldplay felt like the band that finally appealed to everybody. In all honesty it's kind of miraculous that this even happened seeing as how music audiences by that point had become so scattered and isolated from one another and rock's cache was reaching new lows every day.

This would be confirmed when I went to see them live for the first time in 2009. The audience was very diverse, from people of all ages, young and old, and people of different races too. Most of the rock shows I went to for say Pearl Jam or Collective Soul were usually all white and within a certain age demographic, but Coldplay in the late 00s had appealed to everyone. The concert was fantastic. I went with my brother and a friend and we sat in the lawn area and at one point the band actually came out to the lawn area and sang a cover of The Monkees' I'm a Believer. They did my favorite Clocks, but they didn't do my second favorite Speed of Sound which is my brother's favorite so slight disappointment there but overall, I can't complain. I also want to say that Chris Martin's vocals live are MIND BLOWING. He has one of the best singing voices I have ever heard and honestly the albums don't do his vocals enough justice. Chris Martin is that rare singer who actually sounds better live on stage than on record because he lets his voice truly soar live. Easily in the top 5 best vocalists I have ever seen live.

Random side-note for the concert. I remember I had to get up early for work that morning and I got little sleep the night before. I was so tired after work, but the concert of course woke me up. The drive home on the other hand was another story! I seriously do not know how I kept my eyes open that whole drive back (from Connecticut no less), because I was so exhausted. My brother Wes teased me after saying I could have asked him to drive, but I reminded him that he himself was asleep for most of the car ride back. I had the windows down and the music blasting in order to keep me awake until we got home. So yeah that was probably the hardest drive I've ever had to make due to how sleepy I was.

Now we fast forward again, this time to 2011 for Coldplay's 5th album Mylo Xyloto. At this point I was living in the Maryland, living with the family again, doing long distance with my future husband Cory and working at the Courtyard Marriott. I remember I visited Cory during Thanksgiving break and picked up Coldplay's album on sale for 6.99 at Newbury Comics. Paradise the first single was a grower but I liked it more after hearing the album version, because it had a lengthy guitar solo at the end that really helped end the song on a high note. Unfortunately, on radio that solo was cut out even on rock radio of all places, which was another sign of how tired I was getting of radio and its shenanigans. I remember I liked the 3rd and 4th singles more though, Charlie Brown and Hurts Like Heaven which were fun, catchy and had interesting and layered production. If X&Y was the album where Coldplay capitalized on the atmospheric production of Clocks, then Mylo Xyloto was the album where Coldplay capitalized on the success and pop sheen of Viva La Vida. It became another #1 album and did better than projected, proving Coldplay was still the rock band everyone could rally around at the start of the 2010s. It's also the last Coldplay album I remember listening to a lot.

Now by the time Ghost Stories came around in 2014 I was married, living with my husband and working at the job I still have now. It was also the Coldplay album after Christ Martin's divorce from Gwyneth Paltrow. So, Ghost Stories was the really moody and sad Coldplay album about divorce. If Parachutes sounds like Radiohead circa the Bends, then Ghost Stories reminds me of Radiohead circa Kid A. The album feels very cold and depressing and most of the songs communicate feelings of loneliness, isolation and despair. The first single Magic was like Violet Hill in that it did well enough on Alternative Radio, but it didn't click with pop audiences. What did click with pop audiences was A Sky Full of Stars which was meant to be the Viva La Vida of Ghost Stories. That said, I remember hearing A Sky Full of Stars more on pop radio and not rock radio where the group felt like a diminishing presence. Also, even though I liked Sky Full of Stars it did feel out of place on the album and you felt like they tacked it on just to make sure they had at least one hit. I also remember going to a wedding the next year and when Sky Full of Stars played people left the dance floor because it was Coldplay. After being the top band for a few years the over saturation of Coldplay was now leading to an inevitable backlash.

Nonetheless that didn't seem to slow Coldplay down, because they were back the next year with their 7th album A Head Full of Dreams. The first single Adventure of Lifetime was another certified hit on rock and pop radio and the album did well enough, but I remember lots of people complaining about it and saying Coldplay was over. In my opinion I think people just got tired of Coldplay after a while. For myself I think they have been pretty consistent for 2 decades now and they always make music that is pleasing to the ear even when it's not as catchy as their top hits. That said, I received A Head Full of Dreams on CD for Christmas on the exact same Christmas I got a smart phone and Spotify. That album would be one of the last CDs I would own and like Head Full of Ghosts I didn't listen to it obsessively like I had done with their earlier albums. By that point I had more alternative rock bands vying for my attention such as Silversun Pickups, Cage the Elephant, Foster the People and more.

Then I discovered Queer pop and that has really has pushed Coldplay to the side at this point. Coldplay still have some songs I listen to regularly, but I don't listen to them as much as I used to and it's really not their fault at all. I still like their music and their new music I think is very good as well, but they are no longer the modern band with little to no competition anymore. I liked Coldplay and loved some of their songs, but I think I elevated them within my own personal pantheon, because there was little else grabbing me in modern music for so long. Coldplay basically became a favorite for me by default in some ways.

Still just like Grunge was there for me when I needed it, as too were Coldplay. They helped me believe in modern music again after I had briefly given up on modern music in the early 00s at the end of high school. Coldplay's early music reflected my moodiness while in the closet and their latter music got more poppy and upbeat after I came out of the closet. Coldplay's music helped me feel more connected to those around me, gave me hours and hours of music listening pleasure and it has soundtracked a lot of memories that are forever seared into my brain as a result of their music. I would still say that overall Coldplay is a solid A- band for me. They can't quite compete with my favorite Alternative Rock bands from the 90s nor my favorite Queer Pop acts of the last several years, but they still have a place in my heart and on my Spotify playlists. Plus, if all else fails for music in the future I'll always have Coldplay to fall back on again.