Today, we look at who was being “fixed” in Coldplay’s “Fix You.”
This is “What It’s All About,” a new feature that explains what certain notable songs were written about, provided that the song wasn’t written about the work of another famous person (in which case that’d be a Meta-Message).
The closing track of Coldplay’s blockbuster debut album, Parachutes, was the song “Everything’s Not Lost,” which was one of the more acclaimed Coldplay songs of the era (although not a hit song)….
It includes the lines, “But life is for living, we all know/And I don’t wanna live it alone”
The album was released in the United States in 2000. In 2002, acclaimed director, Bruce Paltrow, father of Gwyneth Paltrow and her brother, Jake Paltrow, passed away. Gwyneth Paltrow noted that she played Parachutes for her father a lot while he was in the hospital, and after he died, she and her brother would listen to “Everything’s Not Lost” constantly to grieve their father. Paltrow noted, “This album was kind of getting my brother and I through that death.”
Well, a few weeks after her father died, Paltrow met Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, and the two began dating, and married in 2003.
Obviously, their initial dating period involved Paltrow’s grieving process, and so Martin wrote (well, technically “co-wrote,” as Coldplay credits all of their songs as collective writings) the song, “Fix You,” to help Paltrow through her grief. She recalled years later, “‘Fix You’ was about him trying to put me back together after my dad died. I think it’s pretty nice.”
Interestingly, the “organ” on the song was done with a synthesizer that Bruce Paltrow had given his daughter years earlier. Martin recalled, “It’s supposed to be a church organ but it isn’t. In fact it’s a keyboard that my father-in-law gave to Gwyneth my wife, and it sat in the house for ages and then I turned it on one day and it had these amazing sounds on it.”
Okay, folks, if you have any suggestions for more What’s It All About installments, drop me a line at brian@poprefs.com!
