The lead track from A Head Full Of Dreams, this groove-laden disco number was released on November 6, 2015.
The song was written by Coldplay with the Norwegian record producing and songwriting team Stargate, who have also worked with Rihanna and Katy Perry. Guitarist Jonny Buckland told Q magazine about Stargate's contribution to the tune. "They'd always come back with something interesting, something we'd never come up with," he said. "Like the cut-up vocal on 'Adventure Of A Lifetime.' We'd worked on that song for a long time and it was quite fragile. We had to keep pruning it."
"Adventure" finds a newly reinvigorated Chris Martin singing about finding love and feeling alive again. Coldplay's previous album, Ghost Stories, was a downbeat affair featuring broody electronica tracks, inspired by Martin's 'conscious uncoupling' from his ex-wife, Gwyneth Paltrow. However, A Head Full of Dreams is a far more colorful, uplifting record. Speaking to Nick Grimshaw on BBC Radio 1, Martin described the LP as, "the sound of us being free and happy and very grateful to be in our group."
Bassist Guy Berryman told
Q magazine the song, "started as a freeform musical session and was called something else, 'Legends' or something. It had a different chord sequence and different hooks and one-by-one things were taken away and things got added."
Chris Martin added: "I was asking the rest of the band to start something and I'll see if a song comes out from it, so not everything comes from me," frontman Chris Martin said of the song's starting point. "That's how '
Magic' came about. On this album it happened with 'Adventure Of A Lifetime.' It came from Jonny's riff. I was the last person on there."
Speaking with SiriusXM's Jeff Regan, Chris Martin shared that the song was inspired by a classic rock riff. "I'd been begging Jonny our guitarist for years to make a riff that I like as much as '
Sweet Child O' Mine' by Guns N' Roses, then he showed me that one, and I was like, 'That's it,'" he said. "So those elements all came together, and we just wanted to kind of embrace our love of joyful music and sort of let it free."
The song was performed live for the first time by Coldplay during the November 6, 2015 episode of the UK television program TGI Friday.
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The song ends with a wordless chorus. Chris Martin told The Wall Street Journal that the 'Oh oh oh' stuff does means something. "It's because I don't want anything to get in the way of the mood of the music," he explained. "The feeling is there without having to describe what it is. And we do that quite a lot. People say it's a bit repetitive to say 'oh oh oh oh oh oh,' but you can't translate the melody into words."
The concept for the Mat Whitecross-directed video came about as a result of a discussion between Chris Martin and actor Andy Serkis (Gollum in Lord of the Rings, Caesar in King Kong) during a plane trip.
The animated clip features a group of CGI-ed chimpanzees that come across a clearly branded Beats Pill speaker under a pile of leaves. Inspired by the music they hear, the primates form a well-choreographed band that resembles the Coldplay band members. It took about six months to make the visual.
Chris Martin told The Sun the song was inspired by married couple Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's 2009 book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. The husband and wife's tome highlights the oppression of women worldwide.
The book inspired the Half the Sky Movement, which seeks to put an end to sex trafficking, forced prostitution, maternal mortality, sexual violence, and other ways that women are oppressed. It focuses on microfinance, girls' education and other concrete steps to fight these problems and empower women.
As brightly colored dancers joined them on the field with umbrellas that resembled flowers, Coldplay performed this song as part of their set at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show.
"It was very refreshing to do something in a different genre," Stargate's Mikkel Eriksen told Entertainment Weekly. "The guys are so talented, and Chris's songwriting is on another level. The way we worked was pretty interesting, too, because we'd always have two rooms running at the same time. Jonny would put down a guitar idea in one studio while we worked on the beat in another, and then we would switch and go back and forth."
