Coldplay Already Planning "Viva La Vida" Follow-Up For 2009?

Coldplay's Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends is barely two months old and already the band are aiming for a 2009 release for their next album. The sessions the band had with producer Brian Eno were so "incredibly fruitful," a source at Coldplay's label EMI said, that they recorded more music than a single album could house. "The majority of the follow-up is already in the can, though they will have to go back into the studio at some point to add a few more songs," the source told the U.K.'s Telegraph. So why the rush? The source speculates that after this upcoming album — which would be the band's fifth — could be combined with an obligatory greatest hits compilation to fulfill their contractual obligation to their label. Chris Martin has already hinted at a new record in 2009, saying it would be the likely destination of the band's collaboration with singer Kylie Minogue.

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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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