Songfacts®:

• This soaring song finds Chris Martin encouraging someone to ignore their circumstances and enjoy life so that they can be as free as a bird and fly. Like many of the tracks on A Head Full Of Dreams, it was inspired by the Rumi poem The Guest House, which is about accepting everything as a blessing.
• What's the most famous example in song of likening freedom to that of a (non-caged) bird who can fly anywhere? It has to be Lynyrd Skynyrd's classic "Free Bird."
• While we are on the subject of bird flight here are some fun facts about our feathered friends from The Encyclopedia of Trivia:
  
  The Arctic Tern, which is a small bird, can fly a round trip from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back. This can be as long as twenty thousand miles per year. This is the longest migration for a bird.
  
  The highest flying bird in the world is a type of vulture. The Rüppell’s vulture, or Gyps rueppellii, is found throughout the Sahel region of central Africa, which has been found at confirmed elevations of 37,000 feet.
  
  The fastest bird is the peregrine falcon. It can fly at a speed of more than 215 miles per hour.
  
  The hummingbird is the only bird that can hover and fly straight up, down, or backward.
• Italian string arranger Davide Rossi, who worked with Coldplay on "Viva La Vida" and "Paradise," returned on A Head Full Of Dreams to do the orchestration for this track and "Amazing Day." Rossi's work as arranger and producer has also been featured on records of artists such as The Verve, Dido, Jon Hopkins, Alicia Keys, Moby, Jazmine Sullivan, Rihanna, Duran Duran among many others.
• The video, directed by Marcus Haney, was shot at Salvation Mountain, an art installation in Niland, California. Salvation Mountain was created by a local artist named Leonard Knight, who died in 2014. It is a hill, roughly 50 feet high and 150 feet wide, covered with paint and various other objects depicting nature, celestial objects, and biblical passages (the theme: "God is Love").
  
  Coldplay appears in the A Head Full of Dreams booklet standing on top of the mountain.