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.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 07, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 07, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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QUARTET ISLAND
Mendelssohn on Mull celebrates chamber music away from urban pressures.
FIX YOU
The self-help positivity of Coldplay.
ILLUMINATIONS
Suzanne Jackson captures the transformative power of light.
RAT PACK
The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future.
ROYAL TREATMENT
The unrivalled omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth IL.
WELL, WELL, WELL
Eating—and not-in the epicenter of hype diets.
NEWARK STATE OF MIND
Mayor Ras Baraka's reasonable radicalism.
DOOM SCROLLING
Social media and the teen-suicide crisis.
THE WORKER REVOLT
Harris and Walz try to stop blue-collar Americans from drifting to Trump.
THE CHIT-CHATBOT
Is talking with a machine a conversation?