"O" (Fly Away) by Coldplay, Thursday, June 24, 2021

Coldplay's nine-track, piano-driven 2014 album Ghost Stories, ends with a meditative track called "O." Following his divorce to actress Gwyneth Paltrow, vocalist Chris Martin processes the end of his relationship on Ghost Stories. In a video I referenced last month when writing about "Higher Power," critic Frank Furtado claims that Ghost Stories is a lyrical failure on the behalf of Chris Martin, who disguises his pain behind universal lyrical themes. Furtado goes on to claim that Martin "trades being personal for commercial viability." He goes on to state that Ghost Stories "is so sparse instrumentally that the lyrics have no where to hide." These lyrics he claims are silly at times and empty at others. And yet the sparse lyrics and instrumentation from this blue album, garnished with angel wings and dotted with stars, can be just the amount of quiet a grey day needs.

FLOCK OF BIRDS...This morning I started listening to the latest episode of Our Pod Is an Awesome Pod about Anberlin's Never Take Friendship Personal. Before listening to the album and reviewing it, they played a game. Host Johnathan Rawson read the lyrics of songs, making his co-host, Luke Schwartz, guess if the song was written by Taylor Swift or Anberlin. Schwartz lost the bet and his penalty is he has to attend church on a Sunday. Anberlin on Friendship and Cities was the height of Stephen Christian's most confessional lyrics. The band even tried to submit a song to Taylor Swift from their New Surrender era, but she never got back to them. It's funny because I started getting into Taylor Swift a little late from her sophomore record even though it was already old. Swift's lyrics, easily understood with banjos and steel guitars, were sometimes a little young for me, but sometimes I looked to her because she wrote like she knew what it was like to be in love or lonely or dealing with difficult friendships. We get nothing specific from Coldplay, but we do get a haunting piano and images. In "O," the image is a comparison between a lover and the movement of birds. Just as a flock of birds can't be captured and it's very hard to tell one bird from another--how do you know it's the same bird in your neighborhood?--it's futile to bind love. It's here today, gone tomorrow. But we can believe that the birds will return, and love will also return.

AND I ALWAYS LOOK UP TO THE SKY/ PRAY BEFORE THE DAWN. I'm pretty awful at staying in touch with people. If we lose contact, it's probably because I'm a bad friend. Although my family only moved once, I've counted nine times in my life where I've had a major change--whether it was a move or a new job--and I failed to stay in touch with the people from my past. Sometimes I thought that these friends were everything to me. Now there's just a message dated from 2014 at the bottom of my Messenger app. On a quick Google search for "why don't I have any friends," I learned that as many as 1 in 5 people don't have any close friend. The website goes on to talk about why you may not have any friends. I know some of the reasons why. I like hitting the reset button. When people get too sick of me or when I embarrass myself too much, it's time to move on--like Tom and Daisy from The Great Gatsby. Still, like yesterday the fantasy of having a group of friends that I grew up with and stuck around with even after college is ever enticing. But nope, something was too off about me. I didn't play sports. I didn't talk enough about girls. I didn't do drugs. I was Seventh-day Adventist, so that meant nothing fun on Friday night or Saturday. I was homeschooled. I was too religious or not religious enough. I was gay but didn't know it yet. So fly on...

https://genius.com/Coldplay-o-lyrics

Live Version: