anonymous June 17th, 2009 02:14PM  

"Those who are dead are not dead
They're just living in my head
And since I fell for that spell
I am living there as well"

I think this song is about someone who has lost some friends and finds himself unable to deal with the loss, so he spends a lot of time imagining they were still alive. As such, they continue to live in his head. He finds his imagination, where his friends are, more appealing than reality, so he spends less and less time in reality and more and more in his imagination. In the end he spends so much time in his own head that he has completely withdrawn from reality.


"Time is so short and I'm sure
There must be something more"

I think this is an admission of an afterlife and, quite possibly, a higher power. This belief can help the person cope with the loss of his friends a little bit by reminding him that they're in a better place (if he believes them to have gone to heaven) and that he will eventually rejoin them.


"You thought you might be a ghost
You didn't get to heaven but you made it close"

This, I think, can be interpreted two ways: one way if the person he speaks to ("you") is dead, the other if he/she is alive.

Firstly, if "you" is dead: The person who died is, in an abstract way, still with the living because of how real he/she is in the speaker's mind. This prevents him/her from moving on to the afterlife (again, only in an abstract way). This means that the person feels as if he/she is stuck here as a ghost. The speaker has, at times, almost managed to let go of his friend's memory, but not entirely.

Secondly, if "you" is alive: The speaker has moved so far away from reality to be with his dead friends in his imagination that he is neglecting his friends that are still alive. These friends, or at least the one he's talking to, feels as if he looks right through them. An extension of this feeling is that they could just as well have been ghosts, as it would make no difference to the speaker at all. The friend tries to have patience with the speaker, tries to be understanding and caring and loving and forgiving, but it just becomes too much for him/her to handle. Before he/she reaches the level of being regarded as saintly in his/her patience with the speaker, he/she fails and gives up.


In this song the speaker thinks about life in general and becomes somewhat philosophical and existential, therefore I think the title can refer to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where "42" is the answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything".

schizoid864 August 30th, 2009 04:33PM  

The previous interpretation of Coldplay's "42" is "dead" on. If anyone's done any reading on the Schizoid personality, one realizes that the "thought" (never feeling)is the they are dead, invisible, a ghost. Most relationships in a Schizoid's life are experienced as if they are dead. Interesting song. I feel for my friend whom I've just realized is schizoid. Excellet song!