2000: Coldplay, Parachutes
By Stuti Sharma
One of the biggest things I desired as a teenager was stability, as it was never available consistently on any front. And in the process of writing this, my life dramatically changed when I was offered a position that meant I will not be poor anymore. The ability to give myself some financial stability made me revisit my teenage self in a way that required deep nurturing and love, that involved listening to the music I loved at the time– most notably, Coldplay’s Parachutes.
I was diagnosed with Bipolar when I was twenty-one years old (and at 25, I no longer identify with the diagnosis. We can talk about that at another time). I joked to a friend, “The only inspiring thing about this is that I constantly feel like a teenager.” I think that my ability to feel everything so much is a way to give me a second chance to experience my teenage years, a time I often felt confused and alone and like no one understood me. That’s such an incredibly unique feeling, I know.
Jokes aside, as a teenager, I dealt with the burdens of being undocumented, deeply religious Evangelical, homeschooled, housing and food insecurity, queerneess, and living in a turbulent home where everyone tried their best but no one had enough emotional or finanical resources to go around. I was constantly explaining myself to a world where there was little to no context to make sense of me as a person, but also, I was constantly explaining myself to myself. Healing has looked like deeply understanding myself and knowing that, actually, I’ve always been connected to and belonged to the world –– through music. Music had initially seemed like a way to escape, but I’ve come to see it more as a doorway now.
Our musical tastes are a mix of the influences around us, starting from what we were handed down from those who raised us and a lot of the time, what they permitted us to listen to. I’m grateful for two things: that I grew up in a house where music was playing almost constantly, and that my South Asian immigrant parents didn’t have the time to monitor what I listened to.
My parents had eclectic musical tastes from what I can piece together through their cassette collection; my dad loved Madonna, my mom enjoyed Kenny G. I grew up on Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Michael Jackson. A lot of it was mostly what could be circulated in Nairobi at the time. My mom put me in piano classes before I turned three and classics like Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, and The Everly Brothers found their way into my life. However, once we immigrated, for reasons having to do with familiarity and overwhelm and comfort, the music around the house shrank in range: it was either Hindi, Swahili, or Gujarati songs or spiritual and gospel music.
The music that I sought rather than music handed down to me was inspired from being a preteen girl, an Evangelical kid in youth group, and a nerd. I listened to Radio Disney, songs from the Christian Music industry, and soundtracks (I learned to drive to Hans Zimmer’s Batman Begins soundtrack playing on the radio.).
When I say, “I grew up Christian,” I feel that I never adequately paint the portrait of my religious childhood. I had two Baby Bibles in different languages in my crib. I was a quiet kid with a stutter I didn’t fully lose until I was a bit older, but at five years old I memorized 1 Corinthians 13 (The Love chapter, the one that the words from Lauryn Hill’s “Tell Him” is based off of) because I heard my mom read it out loud many times. The first thing I ever wanted to be was a pastor, until a male teacher at church told me, “Maybe you could be a pastor’s wife?” I’m a stand up comedian now, so I think I won that argument.
The summer I turned 12, I was the epitome of cool and joined a discussion forum for the Chronicles of Narnia, where I could find an outlet for my rage at how the movie “Prince Caspian” was different from Prince Caspian the book. I mainly engaged in discussions about the book and movie, but began weaving a web of friendships with strangers all over the internet, many of them homeschooled and raised religious and angsty and confused like I was. I’m still close with many of those friends and have met them all over the states in the past decade. These were the first friends who opened me up to new music. They would mention the featured artists on the “Narnia” soundtrack, and I would take a break from listening to the moment when Peter’s sword emerged from the frozen river to listen to Regina Spektor instead. Fantasy met reality for me, in a way that wasn’t scary. For about five years, we’d spend hours everyday trading YouTube links, filming vlogs and piano covers of songs, and talking about life in that chatroom.
One lazy summer afternoon when my sister and I were reading a very good young adult series about a king who was a witty thief, someone in the chatroom of the forum sent a YouTube link to “Viva La Vida by Coldplay (with lyrics).” The song sounded like it belonged in the book I was reading. And, musically, my life pivoted. I couldn’t stop listening to the song. I ignored the fact that the woman on the cover had breasts bared (in fact, my budding bisexual self probably was drawn to it for that reason).
My sister and I were both obsessed with this book series, and quickly became obsessed with Coldplay. We pooled together our money and bought a CD of Coldplay’s Parachutes. It was probably the first album I listened to all the way through with no skips. It was the first album that mesmerized me completely that wasn’t about Jesus.
Like I mentioned, my own musical education is all over the place. I feel like I’m always learning new things. As a musician, I grew up knowing jazz oldies, but I literally consciously listened to D’Angelo for the first time two years ago. (My life has never been the same since!) I can sing along to Bollywood show tunes, but I heard “Unwritten” by Natasha Beddingfield for the first time this year. (Again, life changed!)
My loved ones opened the door to music for me and helped me both reclaim parts of me I’d forgotten and discover new things about myself when the first few beats of a song pulled me in, welcomed me into life. I was embarrassed about some of these discoveries, clandestinely watching the music video for “Love Story” by Taylor Swift after someone in the chatroom shared it, fascinated but so detached from the concept that love was possible, as much of my introductions to love had been heartbreak early on –– heartbreak that wasn’t even my own.
So even though I’d never even been kissed, Parachutes helped me process this old heartbreak. Parachutes is stripped down; there aren’t that many other voices singing with Chris Martin. This portrayal of yearning in solitude made it safe for me to feel. Through unspoken and unrequited love, I found I still had the right to listen to a love song. No, not quite a “right.” I know my rights. I learned that I could want and ask for love. The tracklist is set up in a way that taught me, despite my shortcomings, it was okay to be in love. "Yellow" is a very beautiful but draining song. I can't help but feel relief that the singer is alone, because feeling so much for someone truly pushes one to their limits. I had seen what love that bled itself dry for another did, and it was terrifying to me. Yet I understood and ached to feel like that towards someone, in the safety of a song, contrary to all the warnings to protect my young-Christian-girl heart and save my young-Christian-girl innocence for my future husband. I had signed a “Passport to Purity” (which I need to burn still) pledging against sexual immorality, but alone, in my headphones, I had something that explored the depths of what these feelings were, something beyond just stopping them until God allowed me to feel them.
The mix of existential, heartbreaking, impassioned love on Parachutes gave my contradictions the permission to exist: I might have been born into heartbreak but I have always been in love.
As an immigrant, I've resisted the idea that our work ethic should earn us papers. I didn't know exactly how to resist this expectation sustainably. That is, until I fell in love recently. For the first time I loved someone fully, not with one foot on the ground, not protecting my heart, it was the love Regina Spektor told me about. The type of love that has me bursting into tears when I see a kid’s t-shirt emblazoned with something like, "Love is powerful.” I’ve decided that being in love is my most sustainable resistance. I might have had to work three to four hustles for most of my life, but if I can do it while in love, then I have retained some part of my heart that capitalism can not own.
When I had my first brush with depression, a few years after finding Coldplay, I leaned even harder into religion to cope, and was extremely picky about the music I listened to. I’m not sure how to name the delusion I fell into, but it was a scary time when I ignored everything about my changing teenage self because I felt ill equipped and unsupported to handle it. I threw away all my books that referenced any type of spirituality that had nothing to do with Jesus. I was afraid of being “corrupted” by any new music, ditching the lure I felt towards Imogen Heap and Rihanna and One Direction, and I only listened to new music about Jesus or God. But for some reason the one album I took with me through this journey was Parachutes. “Don’t Panic” reassured me that our brains can make the world much scarier because of what has happened to us. I remember listening as Chris Martin sang the words, “we live in a beautiful world,” and the music didn’t really sound very magical or exciting, but in that moment, while in the midst of depression, it took me out of the spiral and reminded me how good life can and one day will be.
The music that we listen to shapes the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I can't remember the length of time my musical repression lasted or what eventually eased it (it was probably listening to the whole “Shrek” soundtrack). I’m not saying that the catalog of Christian music I listened to didn’t form who I am in some positive ways, but when the narrative I heard was primarily one of pleading God and speaking to God about the intangibles –– sin, salvation, hope, peace, the future, the past, the end times, love from God –– it’s hard to remember that I lived in this world, that I am of this world, that I belong here, too, that the tangibles give us reason to “be saved.”
Parachutes brought me back to this world. It taught me how to talk about myself in this world. How to long for love from a human. How to say, “I fucked up, and I’m not sure what to do about it.”
Around this time, my older sister and I listened to the CD we bought on repeat even more. We used to go to church almost three times a week. After services, my parents would go to the gym across the street. My sister and I would go to McDonalds to get fries and then would bring them to the lobby of the gym where we camped out while waiting for our parents, accidentally disgusting gym-goers with the smell of our greasy potatoes as they exited in a renewed post-workout campaign against fast food.
Back then, we lived off buying produce from the discount rack at the Indian grocery down the street. Everything else came from the church food pantry. We lived in a barely legal basement apartment in Chicago’s West Ridge infested with cockroaches and bedbugs, so my parents couldn’t afford to go to the gym on our own money but as a gift my parents got the membership to this elite gym for free. The heated towels, free water, shiny equipment in dim luxury lighting, and mostly 2010’s EDM playing on the speakers was beyond our sense of normal.
Growing up Evangelical, I’d felt a little like an alien. Places like this gym only amplified that feeling of estrangement. Once in a while though, I would hear a song I really enjoyed blasting throughout the gym, and the music would bring me back to myself.
One rainy Sunday evening, my sister and I had just returned to the gym after a trip to McDonalds, we and our church clothes damp from running in the rain. I’ve always loved being outside in a city when it’s raining; the way the green and red lights mirror off the road, the glow of yellow from inside restaurants.
I began an argument with her about how I didn’t like the title of the song “We Never Change.” off Parachutes. The laundromat and the gym lobby were our favorite places to hash out crucial arguments, like who got to put the quarters in the machine that day or the meaning of one line in a song.
“Isn’t change important?” I asked her.
“No,” she explained. “It’s not about that. It’s like saying, the way you and I just ran in the rain to get fries together, and we laughed and had a good time. That’s something we’ll always have with each other, we’ll never change how we are with each other.”
When I started learning about Chris Martin, I ran across a quote on his “Personal Life” section on Wikipedia. The quote is long gone, but it was something about how he didn’t know whether God was Jesus, Allah, or Zeus, but he believed the world was too miraculous to have nothing behind it. At first, when I pitched a tent in Jesus Camp, that statement sounded like blasphemy. As a college student who’d lost faith in anything, Coldplay’s lyrics about being awake and seeing the world beyond the material anchored and helped me regain much of my belief system and how the divine within me has never changed. (I think this peaks in X&Y, but the seeds were definitely sown in Parachutes.)
Parachutes taught me that the sacred and secular are not mutually exclusive. We are all wildly holy. I feel this holiness when I listen to Rachmaninoff choral arrangements or Sufi music for qawwali, music written explicitly for God. I feel the holiness when the first notes of “Can I Kick It?” come on. I feel the holiness in “WAP.” (I mean, WAP is about some holes… ok sorry… I’m almost done here.)
All music is holy music, because it mirrors our divinity.
Stuti Sharma is a stand up comic, poet, and photographer based in Chicago. She is a collective member of Chicago Desi Youth Rising and ran an after school program in Chicago's Devon neighborhood. You can find her in the woods of Illinois or only eating at restaurants where cooks facetime family and at cyborgstuti.weebly.com