The singer-songwriter details how the hit song came to be... with help from Perry and Avicii.
Score one more for the Katy Cats.
Coldplay's Chris Martin confesses that he was "listening to a lot of Katy Perry" while writing the band's latest hit, "A Sky Full of Stars," revealing that he felt inspired by her (not so secret) recipe for radio success.
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"I'll tell you the truth: I was listening to a lot of Katy Perry," he says in a new Beat x Beat webcast produced by Beats by Dre. "A lot of her songs have the same chord sequence the whole time. Your body feels comfortable with them and then the melody's changing on top so there's a groove you really get in to and then also you're kept interested… so I was like, 'that's an amazing way of doing songs.'"
This isn't the first time Martin has outed himself as a fan of the "This Is How We Do" singer. In a 2011 interview with Pitchfork, the singer-songwriter said he was "a slave to catchy songs."
"I love 'Last Friday Night' by Katy Perry almost as much as [Radiohead's] 'Karma Police,'" he said. “If you want to straddle that line, you have to take the slings and arrows.”
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In his five-minute feature with Beat x Beat, Martin chronicled the process of bringing "Sky Full of Stars" from his head to the radio.
"That song really ended up being inspired by EDM, which some people turn their nose up and then you go to see an EDM thing and people are together and having the best time," he said. "So I was like f**k it! I love that stuff. So I wanted to have a song that comes from that world. But in terms of, 'I'd really like to jump up and down to this,' we don't really know what we're doing."
Enter Avicii, who collaborated with the band and helped shape the version of the song that audiences now know.
"He did a full Avicii version, we did a full Coldplay version, and we spent weeks weaving it all together," said Martin.
Perry isn't the only pop star Martin has voiced an opinion on. See what he had to say about the band's "Princess of China" collaborator Rihanna in this throwback, pre-"conscious uncoupling" interview with ET Canada.