I don't think you have to struggle to make good art. I think you have to be passionate to make good art. You have to believe in what you're doing. It just comes from when you lie awake at night.
The lyrics just come out, and I don't know where from. I'm an incredible failure in relationships. I think there's a romantic ideal that I'm aspiring for. I don't know. The lyrics are always about unsuccessful relationships. They're not all about the love between a man and a woman. It's about friendship and family. Deep down there's a lot of talk about general existence.
Everyone from the pope to some hobo thinks, "I'm a human being. What am I doing here?" You can't get carried away with fame and fortune and all that. It's all nonsense. The whole pop-star side of it is all fun and good, but you don't get anywhere without putting in the hours. I get so fulfilled when we play a song live that we spent hours working on. It's all cool. Fame is something to have fun with, but you shouldn't take it too seriously because it is bollocks.
I'm not an old-fashioned, booze-and-drugs rock 'n' roller. For me, rock 'n' roll is all about doing whatever you want. It's about defying convention and being who you are. I'd rather go swimming or running or kite flying.
I think when you're as talented as me or you, you don't need to have an ego. On a serious note, the people I most admire in the world in my field have never shown that much ego to me.
From the very beginning of my life, people have always enjoyed it when I was around for a couple of days at a time. So, I think, most people in touring bands are best in small doses. That's why we turn up in a town, play and then we leave before anyone can get sick of us.
We rely more on enthusiasm than actual skill. Whatever you do, do it enthusiastically and people will like it more.
In America idea of freedom isn't actually about freedom. That's about power. The point of an artist is to find out what are the flavors that I must work with. Finding one's freedom is about surrendering to your helplessness.
All the children of America, up to age seven or eight or nine or ten - they're really great artists. So here we've got this amazing work that very few people pay any attention to, and it's not valued by the culture.
There's this idea that artists are free and that means that we can do whatever we want to do. And it's very important to engage with this idea, just as human beings, that we are free to do what we wanna do. So the real question becomes, then, what do we wanna do? And as one gets to know oneself, one finds that there are things that return again and again that you wanna do.
Painters should shut up and paint and when we stop painting we should dance or have sex or get a massage or take a shower and we shouldn't be talking about painting.
As an artist, one doesn't know what is real. And so there's a search and a process of trying to locate something that feels or appears or somehow resonates with us on a deeper level. This is why art is such an interesting business to be in.
All that stuff about flatness - it's this idea that painting is a specialized discipline and that modernist painting increasingly refers to painting and is refining the laws of painting. But who cares about painting? What we care about is that the planet is heating up, species are disappearing, there's war, and there are beautiful girls here in Brooklyn on the avenue and there's food and flowers.
The word mystical is an even worse word than spirituality - that artists take drugs, and then they add some crazy extra thing to what we all know is real. But our job as artists or as human beings is to investigate what we really think is real.
The word spirit comes from the Latin word for "breath" - spiritu - and the origin of the word spirituality has to do with breath and life force, the mysteries of the ancients and all this. The word is very suspect in much of the art world - the Western art world. Certainly, spirituality has become divorced from religious.
If someone thinks I'm a dickhead, fine, listen to someone else's record, then. We're not a totalitarian regime; no one's forced to listen to Coldplay. It's actually quite a compliment if you're something that people can stand against.
I don't think you can be a mysterious rock star the same way you could in 1965 because there's too much information. Everything you do is available all the time. So the only thing you can rely on is not being false.
Some people say we're (Coldplay) talented and some say we're the worst thing ever to happen to music, and it's a bit confusing being in the middle of that.
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