COLDPLAY

Coldplay
Originally uploaded by jlyn1267.

Once in awhile you get really lucky in life. Like this week - my friend Mandy won tickets to see a VH1 Storytellers episode filmed, and invited me to come with her. And the episode happened to be featuring my favorite favorite band - Coldplay. COLDPLAY!

I love Coldplay. I listen to them when I'm sad, when I'm happy - when I feel like no one understands. When we were in Iceland - we had hours of driving across the countryside ahead of us. We realized that our van had a CD player, but there were no CDs. "Does anybody have a CD?" I had one on me - "A Rush of Blood to the Head". With that, Coldplay quickly became the soundtrack to Iceland, as we drove past the waterfalls and the volcanoes and the glaciers.

Last night, the concert was at a small theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was a fairly small theater, I would say no more than two hundred people were at this concert. The stage was set with lighted globes, hanging at different lengths, and a huge sign that said COLDPLAY, in all caps. Mandy and I waited in great anticipation.

The band came out, and slammed right into Square One - off their album X&Y, about to be released. Nobody knew the song but it didn't matter - it was good and we were into it. Then after that song they slammed right into "Politik" and everybody went crazy. The lights flashed hard, they played and sang hard, and oh it was good.

We were on our feet for the first two songs, but then we sat when Chris Martin started 'storytelling'. He talked about when they were writing a song, and they had basically the whole thing, but there was a key word missing. So they were in a bar and shooting darts, and all of a sudden he looked over and saw the "Yellow Pages". And the song "Yellow" was born. They played that, and the crowd was on their feet again.

This concert was so good. After "Yellow" they played another new song "Speed of Sound" which was also great - I can't wait to get the new album. Then they told a story about "Clocks" and played that. The drummer said that when Chris first brought him that song he said "This was rubbish", and apparently some others thought it would never be a hit on the radio. Ha! "The Scientist", "Warning Sign", it was all great. When they sang "In My Place" they made all of us sing the chorus with them, and it sounded and felt so good that it became my favorite part of the concert.

Mandy, thank you so much for bestowing upon me the gift of Coldplay.