A song that exists because Chris Martin could not work out how to play a George Harrison track on a broken piano in a dark room in Liverpool.
Here is what he says it is about, what the title has to do with anything, and why the video was filmed backwards.
The Short Answer
An apology, and a wish to start again. The narrator comes to say sorry to someone he has lost, tells her she has no idea how lovely she is, admits nobody said it would be easy, and asks to go back to the start. Martin’s own description of the subject, given during a track-by-track run through the album, is that it is just about girls.
The Story Behind the Song
Coldplay were working on their second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, and Martin knew something was missing from it.
He told Rolling Stone that he was in a very dark room in Liverpool with a piano so old and out of tune that it was barely usable, and that he was trying to work out George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity” from All Things Must Pass and could not manage it.
What he found instead was a chord sequence he described as lovely, and he asked for the recorder to be switched on immediately. The vocal and piano takes were done at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool.
The song is credited to all four band members. It was released in the UK as the album’s second single on 4 November 2002 and reached number ten there, and went to number eighteen on the American modern rock chart.
Why is it called The Scientist?
Nothing in the lyric is about science except one line, and that line is doing the work. The narrator says that nobody told him science would be this difficult, and that he is going back to the start.
The framing is a person trying to reason his way through a relationship that has ended. Science here means the attempt to understand something by taking it apart, which is precisely what does not work on other people. A scientist who cannot solve the problem goes back to the beginning and runs it again, and that is the request in the chorus.
Is it about anyone in particular?
Martin has never said, and his own comment was deliberately flippant. The Gwyneth Paltrow theory circulates constantly and does not fit the timeline well: the album was recorded in 2002 and the relationship was in its early stages at most.
The song also does not read as being about a specific person. There is no detail in it that could not apply to anyone, which is unusual for a track this emotionally direct and is a large part of why it has been used at so many weddings and funerals by people describing entirely different relationships.
What is the video?
The song played forwards over a film running backwards. Jamie Thraves directed it, and the narrative reverses from the aftermath of a car crash that has killed the narrator’s girlfriend, back through the journey, to the two of them lying in a field.
Thraves has explained that he took the idea from the line about going back to the start, and that he wanted a story that is tragic but begins happily and ends happily, with the video rewinding to the good ending. His original concept did not include the singer at all, but Martin wanted to be in it.
Did Chris Martin really sing it backwards?
Yes. Because the footage runs in reverse, his lips had to be moving backwards on film so they would appear correct on screen, which meant learning the entire vocal phonetically in reverse.
Thraves has described giving him a tape of the song recorded backwards, which Martin listened to repeatedly until he had it. Accounts of how long this took vary, with one putting it at around a month. The video won three MTV Video Music Awards.
There is a coda to it. After all that listening, Martin decided the end of the song sounded beautiful in reverse, and on the Twisted Logic tour the band played a reversed clip of the ending after performing it while they set up the next number.
Why does the arrangement stay so small?
Because it builds by addition rather than by force. The piano figure carries the first half almost alone, the rhythm section arrives late, and Jonny Buckland moves from acoustic to electric guitar only toward the end.
Nothing about it is loud. A song of this size in a band’s catalogue is normally the anthem, and this one gets to the same place by withholding almost everything until the last minute.
What did it do for the band?
It made them a different proposition. A Rush of Blood to the Head has sold over seventeen million copies, and this and “Clocks” are the two songs that took Coldplay out of the category of promising British guitar bands.
Willie Nelson recorded it in 2011 for a short film about farming practices, and that version closed his 2012 album Heroes. The song has been covered constantly since, which is the fate of any ballad with a chord sequence that simple and that good.
Why it lasted
Because the request in it is impossible and everybody has made it. You cannot go back to the start of anything. The song asks anyway, over and over, and then stops without receiving an answer.
Piano ballads travel through film, television and covers until the original artist gets separated from the song; when that has happened, our song lyrics search closes the gap.