Songfacts®:

• This is the second single from Coldplay's fifth album Mylo Xyloto. The single was shipped to radio on September 12, 2011 and debuted that day at 7:50am on BBC Radio 1's Chris Moyles Show.
• The song finds Martin singing of a young girl's dashed hopes and dreams of paradise. The Coldplay frontman told Billboard magazine that Mylo Xyloto is a concept album, which is, "loosely a kind of romance in an oppressive environment." This song appears be some sort of sequel to the previous single, "Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall," whose title is even included in "Paradise"'s lyrics.
• The song finds Martin taking a narrator role, which he told Billboard was influenced by listening to Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan.
• So what does the strange album title mean? Chris Martin explained to Music Week: "It means whatever you want it to mean. [To me] it means a freedom of expression and you can think up new words if you want to. There's still things that you can invent and words beginning with X are few and far between so we thought we might try and add one."
• Regarding this song's meaning, it is easier to explain in the context of the album. Martin told MTV News Mylo Xyloto is a story, explaining: "It's supposed to be about two people who grow up separately in a very big oppressive city, and they each are a bit lost in their lives." He added that the pair meet in a gang and fall in and out of love before getting back together at the end. The singer went on to say: "Paradise is about a girl really, the female half of the album, just about being a bit lost in the world and escaping through fantasy."
• The music video was directed by longtime collaborator Mat Whitecross and was shot on location in London, Cape Town, and the Klein Karoo in the Western Cape and Johannesburg. We believe it is the first ever visual to feature a lead singer, in this instance Chris Martin, dressed as an elephant riding a unicycle.
• Drummer Will Champion revealed to MTV News that Mylo Xyloto was originally intended to be an acoustic album, but the band's plans disintegrated after writing this song. He explained: "Very early on in the process of recording this record, we were playing a lot of acoustic instruments and we had it in our mind that we might try to record a small-sounding, intimate, reflective record. And then 'Paradise' came about, and it dawned on us that we couldn't play it in that acoustic style. So we thought, 'OK, we'll finish this one and then we'll do another record,' and the realization came very quickly that we can't really focus on more than one thing at once."
  
  Some of the songs from their acoustic project survived such as "Us Against The World." Also "Charlie Brown" was originally in that format.
• When asked by Q magazine how he learnt to ride a unicycle so well for the video, Martin replied deadpan: "We didn't get bicycles in Devon until 1996, so we had to make do with what we could."
• The song topped the singles chart in several countries including Brazil, Norway, Portugal and the UK. "Paradise" landed at pole position in the UK in its 10th week on the chart, the longest climb to #1 since Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" had a similar 10-week ascent in 2009.
• According to The Daily Mail, the song was inspired by the everyday childhood disappointments experienced by Chris Martin's then eight-year-old daughter, Apple.
• The quirky music video for this song, which depicts Chris Martin as an elephant trying to find his way home, won Best Rock Video at the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards. The band beat out the Black Keys' "Lonely Boy," Linkin Park's "Burn It Down," Jack White's "Sixteen Saltines" and Imagine Dragons' "It's Time."
  
  A second video was released in 2012; it follows a day in the life of a little girl who's been released from jail. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bertrand - Paris, France
• This was one of the songs Coldplay performed when they headlined the halftime show of the 2016 Super Bowl.
• "Paradise" was written after The X Factor asked Chris Martin to craft a "winner's song" for the seventh series of the show in 2010. It was kept for the band themselves at the request of drummer Will Champion.