Coldplaying's Guide To The New Album Title: 42

In anticipation of the much-awaited news of the release of Coldplay’s fourth album, there have been much speculation and hypotheses proposed by fans. Let us look more closely.

As has previously been announced in Coldplaying news, it is a special fourth album, and it is possible that Coldplay will call it ‘42’, and there are several reasons, considerable references, and apparently logical arguments that support this as a possible choice.

Firstly, it is known that one of the tracks will be called ‘42’, and that the album, as stated by Coldplay, will be 42 minutes long. What is less well known, is that this hypothetical title could actually be an acknowledgement to the previous album ‘X&Y’ and that the continuity between the third and fourth album is that these songs were previously tested and then excluded from the 2005 album, to be used in the not too distant future.

But, the most significant correlation between ‘Coldplay’ and number ‘42’ is an influence established by ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, a series of science-fiction novels (later turned into film) from the 1980’s, written by Douglas Adams.

In the past, Coldplay has taken the cue from this book for the title of the song ‘Don’t Panic’, coupled with the image of the robot used in Talk, which was modelled on ‘Marvin, the Paranoid Android’. Using ‘42’ would create a real reference to the work of Adams.

The number ‘42’ is the answer to the fundamental question of life, the universe & everything, a concept freely taken from ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ (in fact, the story describes a group of super-intelligent scientists who build ‘Deep Thought’, the second largest computer of all time, in order to get the response they were looking for. After seven and a half million years, the computer provides: 42.)

Finally, the number 42 has significant importance in the fields of mathematics, religion and the arts. At this point, Coldplay have neither confirmed nor denied any explanations that the hypothetical title may be ‘42’, but the number of hypotheses are at the very least surprising and fascinating.