Composition
The song is a piano-driven ballad; the song also contains a piano riff. Chris Martin opens the song and is joined by the rest of the band after the first chorus. The song begins with a four-chord piano melody, with Martin singing. The track also includes a string arrangement. Towards the end of the song, an electric guitar can be heard.
The lyrics to the song allude to a man's powerlessness in the face of love. His helplessness is exemplified in the first line of the chorus, as Martin cries "nobody said it was easy". The song implies that he wants to go "back to the start." The first lines of the first verse emphasise an apology: "Come up to meet you/tell you I'm sorry/you don't know how lovely you are." The song's title also alludes to science in question in verse three: "I was just guessing at numbers and figures/pulling the puzzles apart/questions of science, science and progress/do not speak as loud as my heart."
Read more about this topic: The Scientist (song)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)