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My song is love
Love to the loveless shown
And it goes up
You don't have to be alone

My song is love
My song is love unknown
And i'm [sic] on fire for you, clearly
You don't have to be alone
You don't have to be on your own

Stanzas 1 and 4 from "A Message" from Coldplay's X and Y
Lyrics from: http://www.alwaysontherun.net/coldplay.htm#x

In Coldplay's "A Message," one hears direct quotes from the first stanza of Samuel Crossman's "My Song is Love Unknown" (text).

These excerpts are notable not just for their textual similarity to the hymn, but also for their musical distillation of key melodic motives from the tune by John Ireland.

Coldplay have distilled two key elements from the first line: the opening five notes, and the tell-tale ascent of a perfect fourth that occurs twice in the hymn tune proper ("to me" and "-less shown" in the first stanza).

It goes something like this:

This synthesized motive appears in conjunction with the words drawn from the hymn, but Coldplay don't borrow anything else melodically.

Thanks to Frenchie for the tip.

Strangely, there are very few mentions of this on the web right now: a Times (of London) article on the Live 8 concert and a mention from Andy on the go.

Sadly, many people believe the second line in "A Message" is not "Love to the loveless shown," but "love to the lovely song."

Surely other quasi-religious imagery in X&Y is best explored by people who have listened to it more than I have, but I think there's probably a whole lot there. Am I missing something, or is Coldplay a lot like U2 as far as British spiritual rock goes?

Labels: hymn