Chris Martin Says New Coldplay Disc Is About Love and OCD

Ethan Miller/WireImage

According to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, his band's fifth album will be a meditation on "love, addiction, OCD, escape and working for someone you don't like." The singer told BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe that despite his previous claims, the new record will not be a traditional concept album but instead a very personal work with a consistent set of themes.

Photos: Coldplay's Spectacle Returns to the States

In addition, Martin says that the new record will be "a thinly veiled account of what happens within the group." Given his "working for someone you don't like" comment, it would seem that the band's interpersonal dynamic may be a bit rocky at the moment.

Photos: Coldplay

Coldplay have been working on the currently untitled record over the past year with Brian Eno and Markus Dravs, with whom they previously collaborated on 2008's Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. No date has been set, but the album is likely to be released by the end of 2011.

Coldplay's new record is about 'OCD and addiction' [BBC Newsbeat]

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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