Coldplay’s Chris Martin finds renewal in the City of Angels

Chris Martin has lived in Los Angeles long enough to speak enthusiastically about his spiritual teachers and about the benefits of cutting sugar and dairy from his diet. But the Coldplay frontman hasn’t been there long enough to know that the guys handing out DVDs on the Venice boardwalk want you to pay for them.

“Thanks, brother,” Martin says as one such man presses a compilation of basketball clips into his hands on a recent morning. The British singer keeps moving, but comes to a sudden halt when the guy touches Martin’s arm and explains that he isn’t giving away his product for free.

“Oh, you want a donation,” Martin says, quickly grasping the situation. “All right, man.” And with that he cheerfully forks over US$20 and asks for two.

A simple case of a rock star using money to smooth his path through life? Maybe. Yet the gesture – one of several donations over the course of a lengthy stroll that eventually requires a visit to a beachside ATM – also seems in keeping with the proudly magnanimous vibe of Coldplay’s new album, A Head Full of Dreams. Released on December 4, it marks a return to the kind of earnest emotional uplift that made Coldplay famous but that the band largely abandoned for their previous studio album, Ghost Stories.

That record, full of hushed, small-scale tunes, documented what the 38-year-old Martin described as the “traumatic” break-up of his marriage to actress Gwyneth Paltrow, with whom he has two children. Coldplay didn’t do much to promote the album, avoiding interviews and playing only a handful of concerts. “A bit of a retreat into the turtle shell,” the singer calls it.

Eighteen months later, though, Martin and his bandmates – guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion – have emerged to talk up an imaginative disc that reflects the frontman’s renewed optimism as well as Coldplay’s determination to stay musically relevant at a moment when traditional guitar bands are more or less out of style.