Coldplay recently dropped their out-of-this-world single “Higher Power” and we simply can’t wait to see what’s next. Well, there’s only one way to find out.
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Joining Audacy host Julia Lepidi today for a Check-In was Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, visibly distracted by Julia’s bright purple hair at the start of the chat. “I dyed my hair red once,” Chris admits. “All that happened was my forehead went pink.”
Coldplay released their new single “Higher Power” this past May, marking their first new release since 2019's Everyday Life. The single was teased with otherworldly “transmissions” in an “alien” language, but the band decided to take it one step further. By sending it to space, literally. Chris says that incredible experience came about with a (not so) simple phone call. Knowing that French ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet was already a fan of the band, Chris says they just asked him, "'hey, please might you play our song on your spaceship?' And he said 'yes, oui, of course!'"
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Now, as the world begins to come out from under the covers after over a year of health restrictions, Chris is thrilled to be a part of that new awakening. "I love being in our band, so I'm happy to be talking to people and playing," he says. "You know, we're desperate for work in a way."
"You can't help but be humbled by something like that, that reminds you that no matter how rich, or famous, or whatever you are -- you're just a little person on a big rock," Chris says in reflection. "You're connected to everybody and everyone is connected to you; the one is the good of the whole, and it's good to be reminded that you're part of this big family."
While the band has performed on stage in the new year, they have been relegated to empty fields and skyscraper roofs for the time being. One of those performances was during the BRIT Awards back in May.
"It felt great to perform and I love it so much," Chris says. Although, the current situation, to him, "feels like playing tennis against nobody because you're getting nothing back. But you just gotta trust that, 'well OK, someone might be watching this somewhere!" It's a similarity that Julia sees in her own radio career, making jokes on the air and hoping someone out there enjoyed it. "I guess we've just been experiencing what it's like to be a good DJ," Chris agrees.
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The band had begun their new era before the pandemic hit, a sonic shift from their 2019 offering Everyday Life. With the emergence of COVID, Julia wondered if the sound had shifted again once the lockdown took hold. "For whatever reason, the last year or so has led to us being completely unashamed of being ourselves," Chris says. "There's no point in trying to pretend anything. I don't know if that's to do with the pandemic or just where we are in our band life. I know that ultimately the only response we can have to so much negativity everywhere is to come back super-positive because that's how I pick myself up every day. I'm sure everything we go through bleeds into the music somehow."
Upon announcing the new single, Martin shared that the idea initially came about as a song written on "a little keyboard and a bathroom sink at the start of 2020." Unable to take full credit for said sink, "it was a rental," Chris admits with a smirk while confirming the story. "It's true... I don't often hit sinks, I don't want you to think I'm some sort of sink abuser... But it led to this; it led to us talking!" While a sink may not be the strangest way a song has come to him, giving it some thought, however, Chris says "right now, it would come in number one on the weirdest ones. Although one time I was in a hotel in Australia... you know sometimes in a hotel, they leave music playing on a little clock radio? I came in and it was at the end of this classical piece; I never knew what it was and I heard something wrong... and it led to another song. So, that's not as fun as a sink."
Martin had been holding onto the title "Higher Power" for quite some time, waiting for the right time and circumstance to put it to good use. "It just felt like the right title for something," he says. "In my phone I have hundreds of unused titles." For Chris, "Higher Power," means two things: "One, it's thinking about the bigger power in the universe, whatever you wanna call that, God or whatever you believe in. And then also about that 'higher power' that is within all of us. Everyday is a choice between, 'do I wanna respond to things in a slightly more elevated way, or do I wanna be all 'agggh?' You know what I mean?"
"Ultimately," Chris says about the way he approaches his songwriting, "I'm always following the songs; I don't know where they come from, the good ones. In terms of the sonics, I'm like a lot of humans, I love new things. I'll hear something that gets me going and it's exciting... that could be 'Turn Down For What?' When that song came out I was like, 'how did they do that?!' Then I'm interested in one of those synthesizers and 'where are those sounds coming from?' Then after a while of working with new sounds, you feel hungry for the sound of just an acoustic guitar or something. I'm very lucky in that naturally I like a lot of different kinds of music, and that I'm really hungry always for something that I've never heard before -- at the same time as still being really into the sound of a string quartet. That whole thing blends up, and that's why we keep moving, sonically. But you could always still tell it's us, I think."
Some of the newer sounds that have struck Martin's ear with inspiration? "On Instagram, I saw Roddy Ricch do something with just a guy on acoustic guitar, and it blew my mind. I was like, 'that guy is incredible.' Often with artists, that there's a lot of technology in the music, which would be a lot of Hip Hop artists," Chris adds, "you can say, 'oh yeah, that's just a great beat.' But when you hear them really rapping, just raw, you're like, 'oh wow! This guy is the BOMB!' It's wonderful. There's a guy in England called Stormzy... he's a huge Hip Hop artist in England and he did a video like that. Just him with his friends, and one little beatbox, and it's all live. It's just like, 'wow, how do you do that?' And I love that."
Watch the full interview with Chris Martin and Julia above, and be on the look out for more from Chris and Coldplay in the coming months.
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