Coldplay goes Hypnotic . . .. . . Viva La Vida and Hypnosis

Now this is a fun and rewarding and delightful bit of hypnotic news . . . Coldplay's newest album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends was written in part with the help of hypnosis.

Three years ago, front man Chris Martin (Gwyneth Paltrow's husband) made some ripples when he anounced that their fourth album would be "the greatest piece of music ever made" . . . nothing like putting yourself under some pressure.

Evidently, Martin has been feeling the pressure.

The band (Chris Martin, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman and Will Champion) has been doing everything they can to live up to at least a modicum of Martin's boast.

At one point in the production of the album, Berryman told producer Brian Eno that he was wanting to give up smoking and Eno (web) and Eno reccommended an old university classmate.  Berryman then suggested that they also bring the hypnotist into the studio and have him hypnotize the entire band and see what resulted.

Evidently, Berryman failed at stop smoking but the band found the experiments with sound and music very helpful (web).

According to Buckland, "Brian Eno knew a hypnotist and we thought it might get some interesting results. We all went upstairs, sat down, and he walked around us. He got us into some strange kind of trance, and we came down and played some more."

Martin is more specific and positive in his summation of the experience: "I think. It did work, actually. We came up with a lot of interesting noises, which we used. I think the whole process of getting our own place and working with Brian has been really liberating for us. Because it was starting to become a little difficult to be in Coldplay — there's so much opinion, expectation, and criticism. We wanted to be free from that for a bit, to try things and just be a little group, which Brian really spearheaded. So things like the hypnotism, all these little crazy experiments that he tried with us was just an effort to say, ''It's OK. Not everybody hates you because you're in Coldplay. Just play some music and don't worry about it.'' After about a month of working with him, we literally forgot that we'd ever been on tour or had any other records out."

At a personal level, Martin pursued the hypnosis more extensively to deal with stress and to enhance creativity (web) and felt that it was very helpful.  He said, "It was fun and interesting and we wrote some nice things as a result of it."

The pressure on Martin was such that he felt a need to escape it and go back inside himself and just play with his creativity (web).  Hypnosis is definitely very very appropriate for this sort of work:

Coldplay frontman Chris Martin has revealed he's hired a hypnotist to help him finish the band's new album. 30-year-old Chris - who  has previously confessed that he feels under pressure to produce hit records, sought the help of a hypnotist to ensure new LP 'Prospekt' lives up to success of their last critically acclaimed album 'X and Y'. He said: "We feel like we have so much to prove and so many ideas that we'd like to try - sometimes you need a hypnotist to give you the bravery to do it. Chris - who has a three-year-old daughter Apple and 20-month-old son Moses with his 'Running with Scissors' actress wife Gwyneth Paltrow - also revealed the band are trying not to worry about what music critics and fans will think of the album. He added to Britain's Q magazine: "We've been locking ourselves away and stopping worrying about what anyone might say. It's been about just trying anything without worrying."

Of course, it's not just the hypnosis that's important to this story but the band's application of trance to enhance creativity and to expand their artistic vision (web):

Another thing that helped them out of the rut was hypnosis, with the band's new found adventurousness extending to writing music while in an altered state. Some might conclude they've misplaced their marbles, but Martin seems unconcerned. "Everything over this past few months has been about taking off any shackles," he says. "We feel like we have so much to prove and so many ideas that we'd like to try - sometimes you need a hypnotist to give you the bravery to do it." For the record, he insists the experience, "was fun and interesting, and we wrote some nice things." . . . . . . Will Champion also says many of the songs share a theme: "Trying to remember what's important in your life, rather than being carried away by the trappings of other things."

As those who know my work are aware, two of the workshops I occasionally run for private salons are actually based upon the application of hypnosis to enhance creativity.  I do a lot of work with performance enhancement with artists and performers - actors, dancers, athletes, painters, writers, and more - especially in the areas of reducing performance stress and blocks as well as in increasing and enhancing creative output.

Two of my music-related workshops or "hypnojam" sessions are specifically based upon techniques to enhance creativity.  One is basically a freeform trance-based timeline exercise in which the artist/composer/musician sees/hears the finished creative product and then copies it in the here and the now.  Another creativity process with a fantasy and science fiction twist that I do with groups is a lot of fun as it is an imaginary journey into the far future . . . two to five hundred or more years . . . or to an alien planet . . . and the trance partner is asked to play the music of the future or of an alien species.  One of the jam processes I have played with is to have a musician combine three to five musical styles or genres into one song via intensified imaginative trance.  These can all be fun and therapeutically valuable.  For those who would like to experience a couple of these, I will be covering one or two of the creativity enhancement processes in the Recreational Hypnosis seminar August 9-10 (see http://www.briandavidphillips.com/training/recreationalhyp.html for details).

Oh . . . by the way . . . in another bit of Coldplay news . . . one of my favorite performers, Simon Pegg, recently cowrote a song with Chris Martin (web).  Other by the way . . . as many of you know . . . my daughter is a musician and composer . . . see http://www.kayephillips.com for some of her original music (she tells me she has a number of new compositions she'll be adding).

All the best,
Brian

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Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH [brian@briandavidphillips.com]
Hypnotist, Certified Hypnotherapist, Trance Wizard, Intuitionist
President, Society of Experiential Trance
Associate Professor, NCCU, Taipei, Taiwan
http://www.BrianDavidPhillips.com

Comments

[evelyn cammarano]

I am an artist, and for the past two months, I have been using hypnosis to explore my art more.....
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http://community.livejournal.com/art_erotica/
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http://community.livejournal.com/mystical_art/

love hypnosis!