Formed in Scotland in 1994, and still considered a Scottish band, Snow Patrol is comprised of both Irish and Scottish members. Best known for their huge 2006 hit, ‘Chasing Cars,’ the band has had over twenty singles across five studio albums. 2009 sees the band coming out with their first compilation album, ‘Up To Here,’ which showcases their huge catalog of songs. In this video, http://www.WatchMojo.com chats with Nathan from the band to find out what it’s like to tour with bands as huge as U2 and Coldplay, and to find out if Snow Patrol themselves have any romantic ‘Chasing Cars’ moments.
For more information, check out www.SnowPatrol.com
If you’re a fan of Lady Gaga’s exclusive EP ‘The CherryTree Sessions’, then you’ll love her latest acoustic offering! This time, she’s taken on Coldplay’s recent hit, “Viva La Vida”, and even added some new lyrics of her own! Check it out:
Lady Gaga Covers “Viva La Vida”
By the way, Lady Gaga just confirmed that she recently finished filming her brand new “Paparazzi” music video. Stay tuned for the premiere……
Coldplay have a brand new video for the song “Life In Technicolor II”, which is off their new EP titled Prospekts March. It’s essentially the same song as the lead track from Viva La Vida, but they’ve added words and lengthened it a bit. In any case, the video is hilarious and worth a look to see Chris Martin dance around in Puppet-form:
Joe Satriani is pissed… he claims Coldplay’s song “Viva La Vida” blatantly rips off his own song titled “If I Could Fly”. From NME.com:
Satriani says that the band used “substantial original portions” of his song on the near title track of the group’s latest album ‘Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends’.
The guitarist is seeking a jury trial, and wants to be awarded “any and all profits” Coldplay have made from the song, reports BBC.
While I won’t deny that Satriani’s guitar line in the chorus and Coldplay’s chorus do have similarities, I doubt that Chris Martin and Co. would have knowingly “stolen” the riff without admitting to it. On their last record they went so far as to include Kraftwerk as co-writers on the song “Talk” because they sampled a guitar riff from them. Anyways, decide for yourself:
Coldplay - Viva La Vida:
Joe Satriani - If I Could Fly
2 videos for “Viva la Vida”? One should be familiar, one not…
This album is really growing on me. Nice of the lads in the band to break things down for each track off of Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. Stream the album here if you haven’t heard it yet, below you’ll find the breakdowns, via MTV:
“Life in Technicolor”
Guy Berryman (bass): We always had it in mind that we were going to start the record with that instrumental melody. And what’s interesting about the song is that there’s actually a full-song version with singing on it, and when we came to putting the album together, it didn’t really work in the sequence of songs, but we felt strongly that it should start with this piece of music. So that’s why we ended up using the first part of it, because that’s how we always intended it to be.
Chris Martin (vocals/piano): You’ll hear [the full-song version] at the end of our next record. The reason we wanted to start this record with an instrumental is to: A) do a good ringtone, which is what that song is, and B) not have to have too much singing everywhere. By your fourth album, people are sort of bored with the singer’s voice, you know?
Will Champion (drums): Jon Hopkins [who is credited as a co-writer] was a friend of Brian Eno’s, and he has this uncanny knack of being able to play any song. You can play him a bit of classical music once, and he’ll be able to play it back to you perfectly, from memory. He’s an incredibly talented guy, and Brian brought him in because I think he wanted to free up Chris from playing keyboards too much, so he could do other stuff.
Martin: What we’ve managed, cleverly, to do on this album is work with people who are much more talented than we are, and pass it off as our own.
“Cemeteries of London”
Martin: [This song] features our first use of handclaps on an album. But not the only time on this album.
Champion: The Spanish flamenco clapping is incredible when you hear it done properly, although ours is a very crude and English version of it. It’s like more of a golf clap — “Good par!” — or some seals.
“Lost!”
Berryman: This was one of the first songs we worked on for the record. … We were listening to a song called “Sing” by Blur, and I think we were in America somewhere —
Martin: Detroit.
Berryman: — in Detroit, and we were listening to that song in our dressing room. And we went on stage to do a soundcheck, and we were trying to write a song like that. And it’s sort of evolved in various ways and has lots of different versions of itself.
Martin: That’s often how we write, is we listen to something and we think it’s incredible, and we feel stupid for not having anything as good as that, so we go and try to play it. And then, of course, because we don’t know how to do that, we often come up with something new.
“42″
Martin: [Explaining the lyrics] Well, the whole record is — if it were a Notorious B.I.G. record, it’d be called Life and Death, it’s just that … maybe because we’ve had some people close to us who we’ve lost, but some miracles — we’ve got kids. So, life has been very extreme recently, and so both death and life pop up quite often. It’s called “42″ because it’s my favorite number. And I think it’s probably in Will’s top three favorite numbers too.
Champion: Yeah, 17 and 11 and then 42.
“Lovers in Japan” and “Reign of Love”
Martin: Guy and Will made the piano you hear on there.
Jonny Buckland: Wait, I did too!
Champion: We were in a studio in New York, this place called the Magic Shop, and it had this thing called a tack piano there, which sounds like an old honky-tonk piano, where you put little tacks in the hammers, so it sounds like more of a harpsichord almost. And so we wanted to use that kind of sound, but we didn’t have a tack piano, so rather than sample it, we went and bought an old piano from the shop up the road from our studio, and we bought a load of tacks, and me and Guy and Jon spent a couple of hours pushing tacks into the piano hammers.
Martin: The only thing is, now we don’t have anything to pin notes up with, so we have a lot of pieces of paper on the floor, and a beautiful piano.
“Yes” and “Chinese Sleep Chant”
Martin: Everyone was complaining to us about people not buying albums, so we thought maybe the reason people don’t want to buy music is because there’s not enough value for money. So we tried to add a bit of value [with the hidden track, “Chinese Sleep Chant”]. It’s as simple as that. It comes from the supermarket.
Champion: One of the main things we tried to focus on with this record is changing vocal identities, because Chris has a very recognizable voice. Just the idea that you can totally change the sound of a song and the sound of a band, just by treating the vocals a different way. So in a song like “Yes,” Chris is singing in a lot lower register, and then in “Chinese Sleep Chant,” it’s drowned in reverb, and he’s trapped behind all these guitars.
“Viva la Vida”
Martin: I think everything we’re trying to do at the moment is about not starting again so much as breaking down what we’ve built up before and trying to build something different and hopefully better, or worse in a good way. And this song is one of our favorites, because none of us are doing anything on it that we’ve ever done before. But we really enjoy playing it. The longer you go on as a band, the harder it is to surprise yourself.
“Violet Hill”
Berryman: It was one of the older songs we had been working on, and we had sort of moved it to one side from the list of songs that were going to be on the record. And there’s this secret fifth member of the group, [manager] Phil Harvey, and he really championed it, as well as a few other people, so quite rightfully so, we dragged it back into the short list. And we had great fun making the video for that song in Sicily, on top of Mount Etna.
Martin: We made two videos for that song; the other one’s on the Internet, which is our favorite video we’ve ever made. We just thought it was funny that in the run-up to elections, everybody dances. … And we thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to make a video of just politicians dancing?” So we did.
“Strawberry Swing”
Champion: Those are actually Brian [Eno’s] handclaps at the beginning of that song, and —
Martin: If you listen very closely, you can hear him complaining about the tempo at the beginning of that song.
Champion: That’s mostly what he does, complain about tempos.
Martin: [In a booming Brian Eno voice] “Oh, that’s much too fast.”
“Death and All His Friends” and “The Escapist”
Martin: Well, this is supposed to be the theme of the album, really. We’re aware of all the bad stuff in life, you know — i.e. Death and all his friends — but that doesn’t mean you should ever give in to it, you know? So we all sing that bit together really loudly, as kind of a message to ourselves: never giving up and never focusing on the bad stuff too much.
The nice dudes in Coldplay have decided to give you the option to legally listen to the album before it hits stores. Good for them, bonus points for Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends actually being a great album and a notable improvement over the uneven X&Y.
Head over to MySpace for a listen.
Here’s another track from the new Coldplay album, Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, its an acoustic version of the song “Lovers in Japan”. The album is out June 17th:
After the first single “Violet Hill” was supposedly downloaded over 2 million times, this new title track “Viva La Vida” leaks and its completely different. I’m definitely intruiged by these 2 songs and looking forward to the new album:
Those nice boys in Coldplay have offered up the first single to their new album, Viva La Vida, on their website. Produced by U2-architect Brian Eno this tune see’s the bands sound evolving… I like it, and now I’m definitely curious to hear the rest of the album.
Head over to their official website to download “Violet Hill”
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