There are times while making and posting all these lists of my favourite tunes and albums of each year, times that I err and omit an important (to me) work of music. Indeed, I don’t have a perfect system and my memory is not at all what it used to be.
And so it was, that while counting down my favourite tunes of 2002, I somehow forgot to include “The scientist”, one of my favourite Coldplay songs. However, I can’t very well go back when redo the list at this point so I decided to right this wrong by fudging this new series a bit. “Clocks” appeared on “A rush of blood to the head”, the same 2002 album as “The scientist”, and was released as a single in the US in November 2002. Nevertheless, given that was released in the UK a few months later in 2003, I decided to bend my admittedly malleable rules of inclusion and insert “Clocks” here, a year late, as a sort of reparation for the earlier error. Besides, “Clocks” is a great tune in its own right.
I’ve already shared a few times on these pages about my intro to Coldplay via “Yellow“and ultimately, their debut album “Parachutes“. By 2002, we were all champing at the bit for new music but as it turns out, the group weren’t at all happy with their efforts on the recording sessions for their sophomore record. It was delayed a number of times. In fact, after putting it off, they went out on a world tour and started recording their third album. And it was during these sessions that “Clocks” came out of the woodwork and would go on to save “A rush of blood to the head”.
“Clocks” begins and ends with that piano riff that is instantly recognizable, has been used and sampled by other artists, and is nearly impossible to evacuate from your head once it’s lodged there. The song was built around this riff and despite “Clocks” being planned for a later album, it became imperative to include on the gestating sophomore release.
“The lights go out and I can’t be saved
Tides that I tried to swim against
Have brought me down upon my knees
Oh, I beg, I beg and plead”
The lyrics are unclear in literal meaning but they give a certain impression that is unmistakable. An emotion. An energy. And paired with that intense piano riff and the relentless drum beat, it all spells an immediacy. A sense that you are in the eye of the storm, feeling in slow motion while everything and everyone else is whipping around you triple time fast forward speed. This is life. This is the dream. And Coldplay is soundtracking it.
It’s a beautiful thing and no amount of radio overkill can dull the bright colours and rosy fragrance.
For the rest of the Best tunes of 2003 list, click here.
(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)
Artist: Coldplay Album Title: Parachutes Year released: 2000 Year reissued: 2020 Details: 20th anniversary, reissue, 180 gram, yellow translucent
The skinny: I’ve already written on these pages about how excited I became when I first heard the single “Yellow”. Given how big that song became and how much commercial radio overplayed it, you’d think (and normally I would’ve thought the same) that I might have gotten sick of the tune by now but somehow this never happened. Indeed, “Yellow” is still my favourite single tune from the year 2000. And the rest of “Parachutes” is hardly a slouch. I bought the album on CD on the back of the aforementioned single and quickly fell for the other nine tracks. And none of this admiration has faded at all despite repeat listens for over two decades*. So when a 20th anniversary reissue of the album on (of course, yellow) 180 gram vinyl was announced last year, I did not hesitate to pull the pre-order trigger. It arrived months later, looking and sounding just as sweet.
Standout track: “Yellow”
*I’ve got the album ranked as number four on my favourites for the year in a series that I am still in the process of working out.
Back when I wrote about the song “Yellow” to finish off my Best tunes of 2000 list, I wrote how I still remembered first hearing the track on the radio and the excitement I felt in experiencing it. I also briefly played the game of trying to get us all to remember this same feeling, “Yellow”, before everything that came after with Coldplay. A tough task to be sure, given that Will Champion, Guy Berryman, Jonny Buckland, and Chris Martin make up what is still surely one of the world’s biggest bands and one of the more commercially successful rock acts of the 21st century.
To be honest, I don’t listen to Coldplay all that often any more and don’t think I’ve heard even a note of their last two records. However, I really liked their first three records and perhaps to a lesser extent, their fourth. Indeed, “Parachutes” is still, for me, a classic, the measuring stick by which I’ve always judged their latter work. It is the sound of a young band finding their feet after a few years of slogging it out on the live circuit and striking gold.
The album went to number one on the UK album charts and though it took a bit longer, went platinum many times over in the states. It was long listed for the Mercury prize and has been cited as influential by more than a few newer bands, which is more than we can say for anything by them that came later. Interesting, then, that the boys in Coldplay don’t really like the album all that much.
“Parachutes” nicely filled the British guitar rock void, just recently vacated by Radiohead, when that latter band decided to go experimental and electronic, a fact to which many critics attributed Coldplay’s early success. But for me, the album wasn’t just a rehash or throwaway. It was beautiful stuff. It was long-faced and grieving and claustrophobic production. It was the unexpected discovery of a new voice in Chris Martin, a breath of fresh air before all the pretence set in. It was Coldplay’s most passionate work because it wasn’t planned or expected or foreshadowed. And unfortunately, this kind of perfection can never be replicated.
It’s more than likely that most of you know the ten tracks on this release but I welcome you all to revisit them without delay, starting now with my three picks for you.
“Shiver”: The first single to be released off the album in the band’s native country was the second to come out on this side of the Atlantic. Chris Martin has admitted that he wrote the song with a particular woman in mind but has never given up her identity. “From the moment I wake to the moment I sleep, I’ll be there by your side – just you try and stop me.” Martin has also said that in an attempt to channel Jeff Buckley, the band created their “most blatant ripoff”, and a poor one at that. I’ll have to take his word for it because I’m not all that familiar with Buckley’s work but this track a heartbreaker. A jangling mesh of guitars that starts off in the distance but moves ever closer until it bursts into flames. And then, quiet – an easing, a stepping aside for Martin to shuffle into the light. Finally, it’s all him, pouring it all on, aching with his soul, and he leans on those driving guitars to hold him upright. Else, he might melt into a puddle of yearning.
“Don’t panic”: The opening number on the album was released as a single almost a year after the album’s release. And yet it is one of the band’s earliest known songs, first seeing the light of day as early as 1998. This version, the one I know and love, is perhaps much different than how it originated. And to be honest, I’ve never bothered to try to find out. I love this two minute wonder. It starts with a gentle strum and an even gentler touch on drums, Chris Martin is almost whispering, intimate, an aside to himself and millions of others. “And we live in a beautiful world. Yeah we do, yeah we do, we live in a beautiful world.” The guitars jangle and chime and sing and echo in, shattering a mirror into a million sparkling pieces. The world as microcosm, beauty in infinity, quiet in expansiveness. A young Chris Martin is reassuring himself and us at the same time.
“Yellow”: As I inferred above, this song was and still is my favourite song from the year 2000. It is iconic. It was the beginning of something and the end of something else. It was released as the second song off the album in the UK but first in the US. It was my introduction to the band, as it was to many others. It was in heavy rotation everywhere, ubiquitous for a time, but for me, it never became old, despite the oversaturation. I got sick of the band before I got sick of the song. This is pop perfection. A hammering on the guitars, all violence and passion, a threat to fall apart but yet somehow holding it all together. Chris Martin is right on this same page, singing softly but in a quiet rage, falsettos floating on a cloud of reverb. “I came along, I wrote a song for you, and all the things you do, and it was called Yellow.” It is romance. It is love. And a hopeless romantic like me could never resist it.
To be honest, this particular post is late by a few weeks and now, with my new philosophy for the site, I’m definitely not going to promise when we’ll get to album #3. So in the meantime, here are the previous albums in this list:
My (life in) music lists 