Dear Superstar: Chris Martin

No one on Earth could fault Chris Martin’s political crusades. He hates poverty. Loves global debt relief. Wants to marry fair trade. But, ducking in to a Korean vegetarian restaurant on a rainy Manhattan afternoon, Coldplay’s lead singer unveils his most controversial cause yet: The redemption of Muzak. "This is lovely," he says, gesturing toward the ceiling-mounted speakers, which ooze a tinkling, Asian-ized version of "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da," all zithers and erhus. "These instruments are so beautiful. It reminds you that bad Muzak is often the composer’s fault, not the genre’s itself." 

Nothing, not even Muzak, is too cheesy for Chris Martin. In fact, the defense of cheese might be the campaign he’s most passionate about. The Devon, England–born singer, 31, invests baldly sentimental music with a deep, lived-in sense of yearning; he is an irony-vanquishing, tear-duct-exercising master craftsman of swoons and breakup jams. He’s in New York to work on a politician-mocking video for "Violet Hill," the first single from Coldplay’s fourth disc, Viva La Vida, which offsets Martin’s hug-the-world side (the gorgeous, tender piano ballad "Reign of Love") with a newfound musical adventurousness (the booming beat on "Lost!"; the grinding metal riff on "Violet Hill"). The album was completed only after a storm of revisions, rejections and sleepless nights, familiar to anyone who’s followed the band’s career. Even now that Viva La Vida is done, the notoriously insecure singer isn’t sure about it. "Some days I feel like I’m in a really good rock band," Martin says. "But I never feel I’m really good." Unsurprisingly, then, the prospect of answering Blender’s reader questions has him a bit uneasy. "Ready when you are," he says, fidgeting with some chopsticks and eyeing the tape recorder on the table. "But … am I allowed to skip the ones I don’t like?"

Producer Brian Eno had you hypnotized while you were recording the new album. What weird stuff did he make you do while you were under?
74Oblique, Morehead, KY

We used different instruments and tried to plagiarize the most random stuff: There was a morning when Brian played us a Donna Summer song, "State of Independence," and we played him Limp Bizkit’s "Rollin’." He’d never heard of Limp Bizkit, but he liked it. Then we played our instruments under hypnosis to see what the influence was. Brian just made us not worry about what we were doing. He liberated us. And made us sign away the royalties to all our previous records.