Coldplay's Chris Martin Gets Personal

How Chris Martin learned to live with the haters and get Coldplay back into the sun.

- Josh Ells

On a sunkissed afternoon at the beginning of the year, Chris Martin hops out of his chauffeured SUV at a luxury beachfront hotel and stands on the Santa Monica boardwalk, inhaling deeply. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he says, taking in the golden sand and the Pacific. “Amazing day.” As it happens, “Amazing Day” is also a song by Martin’s band, Coldplay, from their new album, A Head Full of Dreams – Exhibit A that Martin is very much in person the way he seems in his lyrics: exuberant, a little corny and easily amazed.

Martin stretches his legs and takes a minute to soak in the sun. He’s got a swimmer’s build, tall and broad-shouldered, with a few days of stubble and that ineffable famous-person glow. He’s wearing a turquoise trucker hat with a yellow smiley face on it, and taken with his own countenance, the effect is almost redundant – a smiley on top of a smiley. He also seems to have consciously uncoupled from his shoes.

Martin lives just up the road in Malibu, in a $14 million house he and his ex-wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, bought shortly before their 2014 split. “Right out there,” he says, pointing up the coast. He woke up this morning and listened to two episodes of Serial, then, in an effort to get pumped up for the band’s upcoming gig at the Super Bowl halftime show, watched all of Rocky IV. “Rocky IV has the most awesome training sequence of all time,” Martin says. “I think it triggers the young boy in me who saw it and was like, ‘Wow – if you wanna do something, just fucking lift logs!’ ”