Songfacts®:

• This slow and stirring piano-driven track is about a neglectful father who has moved away from his son. Chris Martin voices the child, who longs to see his dad.
• The song was written by Coldplay and produced by The Dream Team, which comprises:
  
  Longtime Coldplay comrade Rik Simpson, who is known for his production work with the band on Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, Mylo Xyloto, Ghost Stories, A Head Full of Dreams and Kaleidoscope EP.
  
  Coldplay's longstanding house engineer, Daniel Green.
  
  Bill Rahko, who previously co-produced Coldplay's 2017 song "Hypnotised." His other credits include co-writing Dua Lipa's "Homesick."
• Coldplay joined forces with Aardman Animations for the dreamy video. The animation company created a clip that uses live action puppetry, digitally painted sets and 2D animation to symbolize a girl's fragmented memories of her father.
  
  Directed by Aardman's Åsa Lucander, the five-minute visual shows the pink-hatted girl lost at sea, alone in a rowing boat and sailing towards the unknown. Said Lucander: "A few minutes into listening to the track 'Daddy' - It spoke to me in a way that stories and visual images began to dance in front of me. And when this happens you know that you are on to something very special indeed. I tend to get drawn to emotional stories and this was certainly one I wanted to tell."
• Though Aardman are best known for the Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run franchises, they have also created several music videos. Their best known visual was a Claymation clip created for the 1987 re-release of Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me."
• Chris Martin is the dad of two children, Apple and Moses, from his marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow. This song was inspired in part from being a frequently absent father. He told The Sunday Times newspaper's Culture magazine it came from three places.
  
  "First, I have many people in my life whose dads f--k off, which is sad and confusing and, if you empathize as a dad, you wonder, what was he feeling that he thought that would be best? Second, I have kids, and I have to leave all the time.
  
  Third, and most important, [that song was] written after learning about the prison industrial complex in America; the outright racism woven into so many laws, and kids who, as a result, are denied their fathers. The world is in such a way that you can no longer just sit back with your creature comforts and ignore the rest of it."