How do you approach Rihanna for a vocal cameo? Quite easily if you’re Chris Martin. Read his track-by-track break down of Coldplay’s new album “Mylo Xyloto” and get the scoop on musical calisthenics, made up words and working with the only girl in the world…
Mylo Xyloto Track-By-Track With Chris Martin
“Mylo Xyloto” – Pronounced My-low Zy-lotoe, it means whatever you want it to mean. To me it means a freedom of expression and you can think up new words if you want to. Nothing’s,… there’s still things that you can invent and words beginning with X are few and far between so we thought we might try and add one.
“Hurts like Heaven” – That’s the opening track, really. That’s kind of our call to arms to each other. I think it’s err,.. it’s sort of like, um,… calisthenics, musically for us. It warms you up.
“Paradise” – If we ever won the X Factor that’s the song we might sing. We never will, of course, but that’s what we would do. I think, if truth be told, we’re not really handsome enough to go on it.
“Charlie Brown” – Is the only song we ever wrote in a doll’s house. I was staying in a place with like a Wendy House and I turned it into a studio ‘cos my daughter didn’t like it. And I came back from a Bruce Springsteen show in Los Angeles and I was like ‘okay – let’s see if anything came out of that day.’
“Us Against The World” – The whole thing is supposed to be a kind of story so they all fit together and that is the two characters from the previous two songs when they meet each other. It’s about meeting someone you love and feeling powerful,… when you meet someone and suddenly everything feels alright again.
“M.M.I.X.” – It doesn’t stand for 2009. It came from (long-serving guitar tech) ‘Mat McGinn is awesome’ so I don’t know why the fuck it got called that! It has nothing to do with anything that… it stands for nothing, it’s just a collection of letters.
“Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall” – So the central theme of the record, about trying to turn – Paradise is kind of about this as well – trying to turn bad things into good things somehow. We as a band have been through some funny incidents in terms of people being aggressive towards us or whatever. And, a lot of the record is fuelled by a kind of fire which comes from turning that negativity into positivity. And I think everyone in their life has something like that.
“Major Minus” – That’s like a Bond villain of a song. A bad cousin of the album. It’s the nasty one.
“UFO” – That’s the acoustic,… that was the first song written for the album actually and the chord sequence in it pops up a few times. And that’s a kind of prayer ‘times’ kind of song. There’s a lot of feeling lost on the album but also being found as well and that’s very much a bit of both.
“Princess of China” (feat. Rihanna) – I actually sort of wrote it for Rihanna and then I liked it too much. And then it became clear it was like a sort of back and forth between a couple. It took about a year to pluck up the courage but eventually I asked her and she was not unwilling. I played it for her on piano in Los Angeles. That was quite nerve-wracking, I’ve gotta to say. And so she said, ‘Oh okay,… Yeah!’
“Up In Flames” – We wrote that about four weeks ago and then we recorded it in five countries in seven days. That was fun. That was when we knew we could finish the record because Will – who’s the hardest to please of the band – when he heard that he said ‘Okay, we can finish now’ – because I think he liked the space on it.
“A Hopeful Transmission/Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” – Well I think we wanted to do an album this time with a happy ending and I think we’ve actually done it, which we never thought we’d do. For whatever reason it is, it’s happened and,… that was very late in the day and it’s nice that song ‘cos you just hit everything as hard as possible, which for a band like Coldplay is a very pleasurable thing.
“Up With The Birds” – That was when we were sort of thinking about a story that seemed like the end of a movie type thing.
Title Image by Brendon Thorne via Getty
