X+Y

SQUARE ONE:
'We tried to make a song like Kraftwerk (This composition is the first official song which is done by Guy and Will and not by me - programming on an old Drum-Computer.)'

Opening is reminiscent of 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' the theme from 2001: A Space Odyessey.

Will: "It started off sounding like Dire Straits."

WHAT IF:
Will:"Lyrically its the best song Chris has written. It sounds really pompous but you know how Imagine talk about how what if everything was great? This is the flipsideto that: if everything's shit what would you do?"

WHITE SHADOWS
was inspired by Tears for Fears' "Mad World." The title "White Shadows" was lifted from a Seventies TV series produced by Martin's late father-in-law, Bruce Paltrow. Even though Martin never met the man, X&Y is dedicated to him -- the CD sleeve reads, "For BWP." "It's meant to be subtle," says Martin. "It just has a way of making sense of death."

Guy: “Sometimes songs we put on the shelf, come back, like White Shadows ended up on the record and that was one that we’d …so we do work hard on every song before we decide it’s not working. They go through a sorting process....I always liked its off-beat rythm”

FIX YOU:
We borrowed from Jimmy Cliff the line "There's so many rivers to cross". Chris mentioned that they wanted to pull a "Bee Gees" and do a 4 part harmony for the finale. Chris:"It was the first song to be recorded and we went back to the first version after 18 months."

TALK

Coldplay take the riff from Kraftwerk's 'Computer Love', Guy Berryman said: "Talk was a song written around a riff so it was quite unique in that respect. It even had a verse that sounded quite like The Smiths and Bowie."

Coldplay admit there are 3 versions of this song ;
Jonny: “They started there and got re-written and then they got rewritten back.”

Will: “There’s 3 different verses. The chorus has pretty much always been the same and the music and the melody.”

X & Y:
We had this track very early but we thought it's boring. One night at home I listened to old Beatles records and saw a making-of of "Dark Side Of The Moon" and then I come up with the idea to play the song in a 60's style.

The title track 'X + Y' is much inspired by Abbey Road era Beatles as Jonny Buckland explains: "X + Y is the most psychedelic and most Beatles we've ever been. It's just one of those songs that took a long time to record though." – Guy

Chris :"I was bathing my daughter and we were listening to 'I am the walrus' and I thought, you don't have a proper verse-chorus-verse-chorus, so I went in the next day and chopped out about 3 minutes. Then we added the strings and this bit on the end. and then it was good."

SPEED OF SOUND:
“We tried to write a Kate Bush song. I've heard "Running Up That Hill" and liked to have a song with the same atmosphere. Even the chords are similar.”

Guy Berryman continues, the track is a great bridge between the last album and the new. “Speed of Sound' is a great first single. It kind of shows that we're about melodic songs yet also shows the progression in sound. We were listening to Kate Bush and I was trying to so some Nick McCabe guitar, so that was the influence really behind the track."

Chris:"I take immense solace from the fact that there's so much that we don't understand, and so much that's basically unexplained. I think it's probably better not to know all the answers, because you can still take some hope from the fact that you don't know anything...It came when we were quite disparate as a band"

A MESSAGE:
Even we had to deliver the album on January. There was one song left, somehow remaining just one idea - the melody of an old church song which we sung a lot when we were children "My Song Is Love Unknown".

Chris claims he wrote while walking about his house in the buff at 2am. He said: "A Message is incredibly important to me. We were working hard to finish the album and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I went downstairs at 2am, totally nude, and I sat down with the same guitar I used for 'Square One' and this song just arrived in like four minutes! To me it's such a special song which I'm very proud of - it was also the last song recorded for the album."

Chris:"My favorite song, its the simplest. It arrived with 10 days of recording left so i t was very exciting to do. It took a day and half to record."

LOW
Chris" A turning point. We had this piece on tour we'd written on tour and I'd listen to it on my computer and think, that's a great thing....In a San Diego hotel I went to the lobby piano and worked out these chords. And then we booked ourselves into a tiny rehearsal space and we all got such a buzz from playing that it made us realize we had gone wrong on the recordings of all the other songs. I realized last August that i was missing everyone else and Low was what brought us back together.""

THE HARDEST PART:
'We wanted to write a R.E.M. song'.

Chris:"It seemed too sunny but then the album is called X+Y, its about contrasts, so when we put it togther it seemed needed. Its very neccesary now."

SWALLOWED IN THE SEA

Chris"This and 'What If' and 'Fix You' have always been on the album.It was meant to be a rip off of the Pogues 'Fairytale of New York'. It's not as good, but that's what you always try to do, you try to better another song."

TWISTED LOGIC

Very reminiscent of the Beatles:'She's So Heavy'

Chris: "That's the only song that people have told us not to put on the album. But they're wrong. It's all about the lyrics, and I'm proud of that song because its angry and very dark and there's certain songs I don't care what anyone says to us, we're going to do them anyway."

TIL KINGDOM COME

It's a song Coldplay wrote for Johnny Cash. It was meant to be on his album, but he sadly passed away before he could record the vocals on it, so Coldplay decided to put it on theirs.

This is the "hidden track"