BOSTON—Shedding light on the emotional state of Coldplay’s frontman and his internal process while composing the iconic ballad, researchers at the Berklee College of Music published a study Monday confirming that Chris Martin probably cried when he wrote “Fix You.” “After months of inquiry, analysis, music theory breakdowns, interviews with those closest to the writer and composer, and listening to the song ourselves and paying attention to how it made us feel inside, we can say with complete confidence that Chris Martin was probably feeling pretty down when he created the melody to ‘Fix You,’ and may have even gotten all choked up,” said lead researcher Yvette Daniels in a summary of the study’s findings, the conclusion of which was derived from a statistical simulation run over 80 times, nearly all of which determined that Martin had no choice but to bawl his eyes out at crucial points of the song’s creation process. “One especially detailed analysis suggested a roughly 90% probability that, while first conceiving the lyrics “Lights will guide you home/And I will try to fix you,” a single tear dropped from Martin’s left eye onto the keys of his piano, where it reflected a perfect image of the room’s single candle. Seriously, just listen to it. This guy was definitely all torn up inside about something.” Popular music scholars are claiming the study’s findings represent one of the field’s greatest discoveries since the groundbreaking 1995 study that confirmed that Alanis Morisette was very, very mad and stomped her feet when she wrote “You Oughta Know.”

Advertisement