"Trouble" by Coldplay, Thursday, March 21, 2024
In 2018, I met a young man who claimed to like “Indie music. You know, like Coldplay and Imagine Dragons?” I hope I didn’t roll my eyes in the middle of the conversation because it was extremely hard to bite my tongue when he had just named two of the biggest bands in the world. The kid in his early twenties talking to me in my early thirties at the time did, however, remember a time when calling Coldplay indie was more accurate. My first exposure to Coldplay came in 2001 when they released their third single “Trouble” in America. Specifically, I remember watching the music video with my dad on MTV or MTV2. While “Yellow” may be the more remembered single from Coldplay’s early days, I only have recollection of hearing the song a while after hearing “Trouble.”
THEY SPUN A WEB FOR ME. Coldplay formed in 1997 when the members attended University College London. After releasing two EPs and signing to Parlophone Records, the band released their debut album Parachutes in 2000 and had their first hit with the album’s lead single, “Shiver.” The album was released just as interest in the so-called genre of Brit-pop was fading out of favor, especially in America, yet experimental British bands like Radiohead and Muse were maintaining and even gaining popularity with music hipsters in America. However, a band’s UK citizenship wasn’t a guaranteed hit back around the turn of the millennium. Coldplay’s gradual increase in popularity in the first years of the twenty-first century was at a weird time in rock music, mainly because the band was a mellow rock band. The lachrymose piano on “Trouble” sounded so different from what anyone was doing in rock or pop music. The song was slow and dark, and the ballad’s lyrics expressed a subject of remorse that perhaps only an established act could pull off as a minor hit between upbeat bangers.
AND THOUGHT OF ALL THE STUPID THINGS I’D SAID. Coldplay certainly didn’t stay in the land of dreary Indie Pop. “Trouble” didn’t chart on the Hot 100, but the more accessible “Yellow” peaked at #48. The band’s second album A Rush of Blood to the Head began to see more popularity and by the time Coldplay released X&Y they had become a household name. Moreover, other British bands started appearing, such as Keane, and the pop-rock band became a huge trend in the mid-'00s as bands like The Fray, Snow Patrol, and OneRepublic racked up hits partly due to the genre’s playability in Prime Time television dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy. All the while, the comparison between Coldplay and U2 grew. Songs like “Trouble” had musical complexity, a trait selected against the evolution of marketability. Still, for all of the hipsters out there who hate Coldplay, please remember that the opening track of the soundtrack that popularized The Shins, Garden State, is Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic.” So, is Coldplay an indie band? Definitely not now. But just like hipster college radio darlings R.E.M. and those listening to The Cure before they were on the radio, Coldplay followed the process of building their career from college radio to MTV and then to the pop charts.
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