A Message

"A Message"
General information
Artist	Coldplay
Released	6 June 2005
Recorded	2005
Genre	Alternative rock
Length	4:45
Labels
Songwriter(s)	Guy Berryman Jonny Buckland Will Champion Chris Martin
Producer(s)	Coldplay Danton Supple
Album	X&Y
X&Y track listing
"Speed of Sound"
"A Message"
"Low"

"A Message" is a song by Coldplay from their third studio album, X&Y. It is the eighth track on the album and is part of the Y side.

Background and recording

Chris Martin and Jonny Buckland said "A Message" was the last song written for the album. In interviews, Chris told that some close friends who had heard the album before its release date, thought a track was missing, which ended up irritating him, as the recording process of the album was troubled at that time. Chris said for The Guardian the initial idea for the song was based on Samuel Crossman's 1664 hymn "My Song Is Love Unknown", but had not followed it up. Later after that, the idea came up again while he was at home, at two in the morning, talking about the album with his then-wife, Gwyneth Paltrow. "[She] was saying, 'Maybe you should try and write that other song'", which made he lost his temper, replying, "I've broken my back over this record!", ultimately deciding to give it a try. "So I went downstairs and sat with the guitar, and in five minutes it came. It's brilliant. And it was the first song I've ever written without any clothes on. Makes it freer."

In a Q&A for Rolling Stone, when asked if he really wrote the song nude, he said, "I did write it naked, yeah. I actually wrote it on a guitar, sitting on a sofa. [...] In the middle of the night, I thought I was either going to be sick or go write that song. So the song just came up, then I went back to bed.

In a fuller X&Y track by track interview, Chris commented about its development, "[The song] to me is a very, very important part of the album. [...] I was in Los Angeles, having ten days off, [...] and actually Danny McNamara again (from Embrace) and my brother-in-law, Jake, both listened to what we had and they're were both like, 'You know, you should write one more song', and I was like, 'You what? I've written a million songs'. But I knew they were right, and we had one more idea for a song left, which was to try to adapt this hymn that we used to sing in school, called "My Song Is Love Unknown", so we came back to London to finish the other songs anyway, and I just had this bug in my head like, 'You got to finish that song, you got to finish that song', but everyone else was like, 'We have no time to finish that song'. And then one night, at the middle of the night, I was just up in bed, totally wild, and something in my head was just telling 'go downstairs, go downstairs, go downstairs'. So I went downstairs, totally nude, and I sat down with the same guitar that a month earlier give us the end of "Square One", and this song just arrived in, like, four minutes and I couldn't believe it. To me is such a special song and I'm incredibly proud of it."

In an interview for Q Magazine, Chris said the song arrived with 10 days left of recording, tooking a day and half to record.

Composition

MTV defined "A Message" as a "guitar-heavy track with a sparsely beggining, which builds into a sweeping plea for love and companionship" with a "falsetto turn" at its climax.

The song is lyrically derived from Samuel Crossman's 1664 hymn, "My Song Is Love Unknown", in the lines "My song is love unknown" and "Love to the loveless shown".

Jonny said he really like the song because it "adds a whole", defining the nature of other tracks from the album as "very dense and there's a lot of stuff going on, and this is a nice space to this song." Guy Berryman expressed he likes the sentiment of the lyrics. "It's very direct, it's not one of the songs which is kind of more abstract lyrically, is just really powerful." He adds: "I guess it's just about sort of not being as strong as you are on your own, it's important to have someone or something to share your time with."

A Message 2010

On 22 January 2010, on Hope for Haiti Now benefit campaign, to alleviate the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the band performed an alternative version of the song called "A Message 2010". After the performance, iTunes included the song on the Hope for Haiti Now album, along the performances of other participating artists.

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
My song is love
Love to the loveless shown
And it goes up
You don't have to be alone

[Verse 2]
Your heavy heart
Is made of stone
And it's so hard to see you, clearly
You don't have to be on your own
You don't have to be on your own

[Chorus]
And I'm not gonna take it back
And I'm not gonna say I don't mean that
You're the target that I'm aiming at
And I'll get that message home

[Verse 3]
My song is love
My song is love unknown
And I'm on fire for you, clearly
You don't have to be alone
You don't have to be on your own

[Chorus]
And I'm not gonna take it back
And I'm not gonna say I don't mean that
You're the target that I'm aiming at
And I'm nothing on my own
Got to get that message home

[Bridge]
And I'm not gonna stand and wait
I'm not gonna leave it until it's much too late, oh
On a platform, I'm gonna stand and say
That I'm nothing on my own
And I love you, please come home

[Outro]
My song is love, is love unknown
And I've got to get that message home

Official audio

A Message

Critical Reception

Billboard praised the track, saying it "would make a logical choice for a second single, its strong sonic debt to U2 belied by Martin's unabashedly sentimental lyrics".