The Scientist

Chris Martin has told this story more than once: alone at an out-of-tune piano in Liverpool, trying to work out George Harrison's “Isn't It a Pity” from memory, he landed on the four-chord phrase that opens this song instead — Dm7 to B♭ to F to Fsus2. He asked for a recorder on the spot, and much of that first take made it onto the finished single from Coldplay's second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002).

The music video adds a strange footnote: it's shot forward but plays back-to-front, so Martin had to learn to lip-sync the whole song phonetically in reverse — a process that reportedly took him about a month. None of that shows up in the sheet music, but it's part of why the song feels suspended in time even heard on its own.

The four chords repeat with only small voicing changes for almost the entire song, which makes it a genuinely good first “real” song to learn — Dm7 and F share three of their four notes, so if it feels like you're barely changing anything under the melody as it moves between them, that's correct; that's the whole trick of the progression.

This page is a lead sheet — melody, lyrics, and chord symbols, not a fully written-out left hand — so you have real room to decide how to accompany it. Broken octaves or a simple root-fifth pulse both work; start with quarter-note blocked chords if you're newer to turning chord symbols into something playable.