Britpop’s original army of one-name rock acts—Oasis, Blur, Suede, Pulp—had players and fans who thrived on conflict and snarl. Throughout the 1990s a new strand of mostly one-name UK bands formed—Travis, Keane, Doves, Coldplay—and swelled in popularity as the century turned, constituting the post-Britpop movement and its softer, more yearning sounds. Obsessed as they were with relationships and heartbreaks, they were emo-coded without the punk screaming or scenester uniforms. You can’t not find humor in realizing that Embrace was a name shared by both an early emocore band from D.C. and a Coldplay contemporary from West Yorkshire who scored a hit with a song Coldplay couldn’t use.
Frontman Chris Martin, guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman, and drummer Will Champion brought to Coldplay the kind of lilt and jangle that Jeff Buckley and Elliott Smith had brought to microphones as soloists. They also supplied a kind of nervousness very different from that of Buckley and Smith’s lyrical and sonic fragility, one that almost imposter-syndromed the band out of their first big contract. From these jittery origins, the results are nothing if not ironic and iconic. With the in-studio lore that inspired their smash single “Yellow” alongside overt and covert lyrical instructions to not panic, Parachutes is a study in both acoustic and electric relaxation.
It’s hard to talk about putting a piece of art in the context of your life when your life, such as it was, was rather unremarkable. I don’t remember how or where I got turned on to “Yellow,” but MTV and modern-rock radio were still vital concerns in the year 2000 so I’m sure they were involved. Frankly, I have to piece together a lot of that year from scraps of memory. An unforgettably bad mix of champagne and medication on Y2K eve signals I’d been finally, officially diagnosed with ADHD. I’m pretty sure I was still designing for traditional print media and hadn’t yet entered the dot-com bubble just as it was about to burst. Bill Clinton and his stained Presidential reputation were limping to history’s finish line—the Bush-Gore election debacle was months away, 9/11 a year beyond that.
So yeah, why did I stay so enamored with the song, full as it is of Martin’s plaintive and cooing falsetto? Maybe it was such a brave embrace of a delivery style that might be a death knell for many songs? Maybe the simple half-speed video? Maybe it was the unabashed love-song lyrics? I mean, the year 2000 for me was also the halfway point of a marriage that was OK but getting worse. Music has always been a love language for me, and especially in those latter-day mix tape/CD times I used it as a medium to express love and a tool to try to preserve it. “Yellow,” and with it its crystalline home album, felt successful in the moment even if it failed me and my partner in the long run.
Parachutes didn’t have Coldplay burst onto the scene so much as unassumingly shuffle, with measured sounds and sensitive words that took many steps away from what would later be diagnosed as the toxic masculinity coursing throughout rock as we knew it. To be sure, it trades in its fair share of paranoia over objects of affection as music men have done since time immemorial. But even if Martin’s lyrical vocabulary was pretty recognizable, the twists in his thematic roads felt new. “Shiver” is obsessive as “Every Breath You Take” once was, but Martin notes the woman he pines for doesn’t think about him at all, Mad Men meme style.
Multiple songs seem to talk about admiration not just for people, but things and concepts as well. “We Never Change” begs for simplicity in relationships and the world as a whole, while the Radiohead-esque “High Speed” (repeated from a 1999 EP) could be about navigating fame or a difficult partner. Double meanings are also possibly, maybe found in songs’ single topics. Are those sparks in your relationship evidence of excitement or the first sign of things breaking apart? If the people who might harm you are far enough away from you, why are you still paranoid about them? This earliest iteration of Coldplay looked to inspiration from uniquely British pop culture like James Bond and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, steeping Parachutes in cheeky yet subtle romance and humor.
Chris Martin’s on the record as saying the band look back at this album through the lens of time and think it’s not very good, and where they head next is always where they want to be. With their second LP, A Rush of Blood to the Head, Coldplay would start to filter U2’s early earnest bombast through the meandering version of it heard in that band’s later work. You could also accuse Coldplay of being at the root of the kind of stadium-ready stomp found in a string of profitable but stilted successors, the Lumineer Mumford and the Foster Dragon 5 of it all.
Sometimes we have better memories of or fondness for something we observe than do the people actually in the middle of that something, like a relationship ending that takes the couple’s friends by surprise. So I’ll always look at Parachutes as a reminder that Coldplay didn’t always feel like a caricature. Even at its loudest, most upbeat points there’s a languid, calm air to this album, one that’s absent from most everything that followed in the band’s catalog. It delivered twang sharing DNA with alt-country; it dabbled in the basement echo and drone of The Velvet Underground before them and Luna alongside them. It was dream-pop before the dream chasing began, heard in elements like the vibrato guitar and Martin’s reaching, reedy vocals in “Trouble.”
Everything on Parachutes might have seemed too soft to be a hit or an anthem on first listen. Given the chart success of Coldplay and their sometimes saccharine familiars, a post-Britpop backlash came hard and fast led by garage rock, moody post-punk revivalists, and the relentless shimmy and shake of indie-dance. Now we realize even closing bow “Everything’s Not Lost” comprised a ghostly transmission from the band’s future selves—don’t give up, defeat your demons, turn on your phone lights and flick your lighters. Before the corporate arena tours and celebrity marriages and activism took over, Coldplay were just four late Generation X denizens, “kids” who were no longer kids, who looked at life and love in the millennium to come and faced them with a blend of scruffy innocence and pragmatism. Parachutes was refreshingly gentle and honest at a time when few things were.
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