Music: O (Fly On) - Coldplay

O (Fly on)

Artist: Coldplay

Album: Ghost Stories

Genre: Alternative Rock

Release Date: 2014

Plays: 190

This song is beautiful. Before you read this I would like you to lie on a floor, close your eyes and listen to the song. I know you may not like Coldplay but this is one of their less well known songs and therefore not the Coldplay you expect to hear. To be perfectly honest, as a Coldplay fan I was not particularly impressed by Ghost stories as an album... It's slow-paced and a little low, but on listening to it a number of times it is very much a chill album that can float along in the background while I work; but it wouldn't be my first choice.

So into the song, the piano motif begins with a repeated chord pattern of 4 chords remaining the same almost all the way through, it is a solid constant driving the song onward for the whole almost 4 minutes. It's soft, it's melodic, it's melancholic, it's beautiful. When Chris Martin comes in (after 8 bars) with the words the melancholic tones continue and the picture begins to be painted. You look up to the birds, that flock of birds. I imagine a pure flock of doves like clouds in the sky, and then his voice raises above toward those birds with the slight augmentation which takes the song above the world in which we experience it and as the first verse ends with "Fly on" the bass (by the gorgeously sexy talents of Guy Berryman) comes in to add a deep grounding thread feeling like a heartbeat moving gently through.

There is no chorus in this song and I love this, the song is forced to continue, it is is the bare bones of a song. A lone piano voice and bass. A reminiscing trio where the sustain is held throughout filling what would be empty space. Oscillating like a wave the lyrics soar; an albatross making a gentle journey across the wide expanse. There is no urgency to go anywhere but the song must continue on, illustrated as the chord sequence changes and the lyrics become both absent and present, free and forced before the final theme comes in. More voices join and the song becomes hopeful, trance-like and aspirational and little chirps of synthesised noise are added in the background which sound slightly pained and the song draws to a close with a decrescendo into a regretful sigh of "fly on" which feels almost remorseful... But equally is completely understanding. The voice alone ends the song with the sustained piano sitting below, and then the song repeats and you drift again into that ethereal world...

Keep exploring music,

Naomi