Coldplay’s “Fix You” has always been something of a hymn, and last night, the song finally got the chorus it needed. In yours MTV Unplugged In a performance, the seven members of the South Korean pop power BTS made an angelic version of the song, meticulously arranged and chilling. It was a ridiculously perfect performance that should convert all remaining skeptics from K-pop, Coldplay, upward ballads and / or the power of the human spirit.
“This song gave us comfort,” said BTS’s Jimin, “so we wanted to prepare this cover to comfort you too.”
In the BTS version, what was a song about a person’s pain became the story of a year of worldwide suffering. Coldplay’s Chris Martin was reluctant to admit when the song was released in 2006, but he originally wrote “Fix You”, at least in part to comfort his then wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, after the death of his father, Bruce Paltrow. (Martin even plays a keyboard that belonged to Bruce in the original recording.)
“Each album has a key song around which other things are written and without which you couldn’t do other things,” Martin told me in interviews for his 2008 Rolling Stone cover story. “On the third album, [2005’s X&Y], it was ‘Fix you’. And they were all an absolute nightmare to record, and it’s horrible, and it takes forever. I don’t know what it is – that pressure or something, because you can hear it is good. “
Musically, the song was inspired by the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” chords, Martin said, while acknowledging that his emotional candor is more in line with REM’s “Everybody Hurts”. “I don’t think we could get over it as a direct Coldplay song,” he said. “This song is very special to me, because there is no element of it trying to be cool. You’re not trying to be nervous. If your damn grandfather died, it could be something that makes you cry, you know? “
“I never feel ashamed for writing it,” continued Martin. “It’s not ‘Paranoid Android’. But sometimes you don’t have to worry about being nice, I think, because sometimes real life is not so nice. And many of us are not that cool, really. “