I still remember my first encounter with Coldplay's music quite clearly. I'm not quite sure whether this happened somewhere before or after I've known them as a band and discovering their radio/mtv friendly songs like fix you or yellow, but here goes.
Back in the glory days of tumblr, I used to look up to my following for, mostly aesthetics and literature references, but also good music. Tumblr is a very personal social media, in a sense, that the content you're seeing in your timeline is really personally curated and in some way a personification of those you chose to follow. The social media is also well known, nowadays, as one of those secretive, 'you don't know me on tumblr' tagline, meaning you can really know someone from so many perspective and depths and layers through what they posted or reblogged, all kinks and shades and weird stuff. It was really one of the best of times to be on the internet. (Am looking at it with the rosy tinted glass the way people used to look at, perhaps the wonderful chaos that is Woodstock.)
This wonderful chaos was also what made actually searching for something on tumblr rather very difficult, as the tags are most of the time not properly correct or even available (and the ones that do are usually not quite the one you were searching for). In other words, time and patience are the currency in exchange for stumbling upon wonderful things.
The media/song player of tumblr, back then, was a mere plain white box, about 0.5 * 4 cm in size, with a simple black 'play' icon on the middle left side. One fine day, I stumbled upon this song post with no actual written title, or even written anything, I think. I forgot what it was that compelled me to listen to it, as my fragment of memory showed no text underneath the media player (tho perhaps I've just forgotten what was written underneath and took the liberty of erasing it), but I pressed play anyway. It was Clocks by Coldplay.
The intro was what must've felt like to float in a slow, forward motion through the clouds, all smithereens and specks of white sparse cotton, a bed of stratocumulus clouds under your feet, a warm golden glow from the setting sun.
The task at hand, back there, was to find out the name of the song and of the band. There was no clue left behind whatsoever, no shazam or soundhound or anything. The only solution I could think of was to google one of the lyrics, usually the reff part that stood out therefore might've been the actual title. Now, the reff part of Clocks isn't much an actual word/sentence, and the rest of the lyrics isn't exactly crystal clear to the ears of an ordinary middle school kid from a third world country having first discovered the internet only several years before.
I try my best not to take my piece of memory for granted and dramatize it so to the extent of forgetting which was actually real and which was what I think was real (then again, this piece of writing is in a way a dramatization of such memory, but, still), after several listen, there was this certain punctuation in the way he sang 'closing walls and ticking Clocks', you see, so I must've googled something along the lines of 'clocks song/clocks lyrics', which was rather absurd if you think about it. And that's how I met one of the most wonderful otherworldly magical musician/band in the universe.
I wrote this several hours before watching A Head Full of Dreams, tho. My heart caves in (as in, its still an ongoing process right now). I love them so much.