Inside Coldplay's Intimate Yahoo! Music Taping: What You Won't See

When Coldplay took the stage at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom on October 22nd to film a performance for Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo! Music, the 200 fans in attendance found themselves in the midst of an unusually intimate set — the Ballroom usually holds 2,000 or more people, and Chris Martin and Co. were in the midst of an arena tour. The performance and two-part question and answer session premiere online today in 13 countries, but not everything made the final cut, so here's a rundown of what Rock Daily saw behind the scenes:

• Frontman Chris Martin was riding the wave of the Presidential election at the late October shoot, joking about Joe the Plumber and quipping that he was "sweating more than a John McCain adviser" as he took off his overshirt midway through the performance.

• While Coldplay buddy Jay-Z watched the entire set from a seat in the venue's opera boxes (it was easy to spot his head enthusiastically bopping during the entire set), he didn't join the band on stage to turn "Lost!" into "Lost+".

• Beyoncé arrived midway through the taping, taking her seat next to Jay-Z during the band's performance of "Yellow."

• Coldplay released their butterfly confetti shower at the end of "Lovers in Japan" (a staple for their arena tour) — but probably didn't anticipate having to restart the song because of a keyboard missing from the stage.

Related Stories:
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• Album Review: Coldplay, Prospekt's March EP
• Chris Martin: The Jesus of Uncool

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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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