FIX YOU

The self-help positivity of Coldplay.

- AMANDA PETRUSICH

On a recent afternoon in Malibu, Chris Martin, the front man of Coldplay, was enjoying a brief pause 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 under him. Martin, who is forty-seven, was wearing an emerald-green sweater featuring a picture of the earth, affixed with a tiny white button that said "LOVE." Later on, when he took the sweater off, he revealed a blue T-shirt with the same button. I wondered, but did not ask, how many of them he owned. It felt indicative of Martin's quintessence at this particular moment: LOVE, layered ad infinitum.

Martin was in the midst of converting an old property into a studio and the de-facto Coldplay HQ. The complex was beset by scrubby clay slopes dotted with sagebrush, California aster, evergreen oaks. Martin likes to send visitors home with unlabelled jars of fresh honey from an apiary nearby. We sat at a picnic table overlooking a meadow. In conversation, Martin is engaging, magnetic. When I apologized for putting my sunglasses on-the light had suddenly shifted-he grinned: "No, I love it. It sort of flips the script. We'll talk about your album in a minute." We'd been discussing the gurgling anxiety inherent to any romantic entanglement the fear of starting to need someone. It's an idea that arises in "feels like I'm falling in love," the swooning first single from "Moon Music," the band's tenth record, which comes out in October. "I know that this could feel like that/But I just can't stop/Let my defenses drop," Martin sings in the opening verse.