You may have had different events happen in your life, but I am sure that they were just as significant to you as mine were to me. The business has taken a back seat – or perhaps better said, it got kicked off the bus! Needless to say, I have been thrown a hard curve ball these past couple of months! I’ve been knocked off my game and have been totally distracted by more important personal matters. Sadly, he never recovered and passed away just last week.īeing from a large family (12 children) in Ohio, it meant dropping everything and spending time in Ohio working through the details of a funeral, the emotions of multiple siblings, and the realization that my hero, my Dad, was gone. Then, to make things even more challenging, my father unexpectedly had a stroke that left him in the hospital ICU for 2 weeks. Many optional business plans were shelved for a couple of months while we focused our time on our new graduate. This was a particularly exciting time for us – but it left little time for working on the business.
Full of excitement and anticipation along with loads of details, scheduled events, parties, gifts and final preparations for heading to college. This year we had the honor of watching our son, Rhett, graduate from high school. Late Spring and Early Summer are great times if you’re a high school student – but not necessarily so for the parents. How do I know this? Because I’ve been living it these past 2 months! They may be something very good, even great, but they are huge distractions and suck our time, energy and focus right away from us.
These curve balls are not always negative events. They take our focus off our business and bring us down – sometimes even to the edge of depression. And sometimes those curve balls totally throw us off our game. All these cameos suit the overarching theme of A Head Full of Dreams - how there's a big, bright, beautiful world just waiting to be discovered if you just open your heart and live a little - and if this message is unabashedly corny, under the stewardship of Chris Martin, Coldplay cheerfully embrace the cheese, ratcheting up both the sparkle and the sentiment so the album feels genuine in its embrace of eternal middle-aged clichés.Sometimes life throws us curve balls. Appropriately, Coldplay invite more than a few guests to help usher them into this brave new world, the showiest being Beyoncé, who overwhelms the band's innate politeness on "Hymn for the Weekend," but Tove Lo eases right into "Fun" and Noel Gallagher amiably allows himself to be swallowed by the gentle wash of guitars and synths. This carpe diem spirit courses throughout A Head Full of Dreams, turning it into a 21st century equivalent of Steve Winwood's Back in the High Life, a divorce record where every end seems like a fresh new beginning.
Arriving after the deliberately dour Ghost Stories, this infusion of backbeat and glitz does indeed feel welcome and bold but such determined levity also suggests the gusto of a greying divorcee boogying down on the deck of a cruise ship, determined to seize every bit of life headed his way. He's quite literally having "Fun" on an "Amazing Day," living for the weekend and viewing his impending middle age as nothing so much as the "Adventure of a Lifetime." Coldplay match his optimism by tempering their signature soft focus, pushing themselves toward the light and undergirding the newfound positivity via glittering disco beats and a gossamer electronic sheen. Martin gives away the game with his song titles. Where Chris Martin spent Ghost Stories in a mournful mood - his sorrow perhaps derived from his divorce to Gwyneth Paltrow or perhaps not it's best not to read too much into the tabloid headlines - the Coldplay leader sees nothing but sunshine and stars on A Head Full of Dreams. Released swiftly after Ghost Stories - just a year and a half, all things considered - A Head Full of Dreams plays like a riposte to that haunted 2014 album.
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