katherinemarie

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Hi-- I'm Kath. I sing, play a plethora of instruments, and am a music major. I love looking for meaning and stories inside lyrics and listening to other's take's on songs. I think that the true beauty in music lies in the art of personal interpretation.
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Coldplay – Yellow Lyrics 10 years ago
So I started learning this and it got me thinking, what does this song really mean? What’s it about? This inspired a late night web search looking for information about the song’s origin. It is my humble understanding that the band was recording late into the night in the studio when someone told them to come outside and look at the stars which were mesmerizing. While standing out there looking up at the stars, the melody of the song just came to them.

That, however beautiful, didn’t do a ton for me “meaning-wise” so I decided to take it a step further. I visited this site actually, and read about four or five pages of interpretations and was intrigued to see that my interpretation was so "outside the box" so to speak.

BE WARNED THIS IS SAD AND MAY BE A TRIGGER TO THOSE WHO HAVE LOST LOVED ONES TO CANCER.

My interpretation is this-


V1) Little boy falls in love with little girl. They play and spend all of their free time together. Because he's a little boy he doesn't quite understand his feelings towards this girl, only that she seems to make the universe a brighter, more hospitable place, and that he'd do anything for her- like write a song for instance. As they grow older into their teen years they grow apart and he lets her slip through his fingers until he is just "the boy across the street who she used to play with when she was little".

C1) Sadly, the girl across the street becomes very sick very suddenly. After many trips to the doctor and to many specialists, it becomes evident the girl has cancer. (skin or bone). Everyone in their highschool is devastated and it's all anyone can talk about. The boy, who has been loving her from afar from all these years becomes close with her again after his family helps out quite a bit with the girl's family (you know how mothers operate, bringing freezable dinners over, offering to take younger siblings off their hands for a few hours, grocery shopping, visits to hospital, etc). The two of them are soon inseparable once again, much to the boy's delight.

V2) As the two become closer in their friendship, the boy is finding it harder to hide his feelings for the girl. He can't help it after all, he has been in love with her since he was a little boy. Now, what he doesn't know is the girl is starting to fall for him too. Somehow, they end up confessing their feelings to each other, but the girl, knowing that she is very seriously ill and not likely going to survive lies to the boy and says she doesn't love him in that way, thus attempting to draw a boundary "line" in their relationship.

C2) Not long after, maybe a few days, the girl becomes even sicker. The doctors discover she is in need of a bone marrow transplant. They boy (of course) is an exact match. Even though donating bone marrow is an extremely invasive and painful procedure the boy won't let anyone talk him out of saving her girl he loves. The transplant goes well, and at first she looks like it's taking and that she is going to make it, until all the sudden she develops a fever that spikes, due to an infection in her blood. To everyone's heartbreak, she passes away after fighting for almost a year. The boy wishes nothing more than for his self to be in her place, for her to have his blood instead of hers, for her to be alive, he not.

Outro) After the girl's passing, everything seems like a bleaker place to the boy who is obviously depressed. A few days before her funeral, the girl's mother finds a letter that her daughter wrote for the boy telling him she knew she was dying, but not to miss her because she loved him and had hope that everything would turn out okay in the end, with out without her earthly presence. The only thing that gives him any consolation after this is looking up at the stars every night and seeing how they almost seem to shine brighter because she's up there, in heaven. It was her bright smile, the way her eyes seemed to sparkle when she laughed, or the way her cheerful personality could light up even the darkest room that now lights the night sky, leaving an eternal reminder of her impact on his life.

I have no idea if this is anything close to what Coldplay was thinking when they wrote Yellow, odds are this isn't it at all, but I think the beauty of music lies somewhere in the fact that a thousand people can listen to this song and it can have a thousand different meanings to those thousand people. There is no right answer, just guesses. This is my guess, and I sincerely apologize if it made you cry. The first time I explained it to my mom she had to grab a Kleenex or two, so once again, if this was a trigger to any unpleasant memories or things alike- I am very sorry.

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