He was later confirmed as the main producer of Music of the Spheres. He is considered by them as a new band member, as they acknowledged their intentions to keep working with him as their current producer in future projects. The rest of the band also shared of the same feeling, making "Higher Power" the first time Coldplay has fully collaborated with him as a main producer. Max worked with Coldplay for the first time when he co-produced two tracks from their 2019 eighth studio album, Everyday Life: " Orphans" and " Champion of the World".Ĭhris and Max met for the first time in Sweden at a Rihanna concert in 2016, and shared their mutuous feeling of wanting to work together someday. He achieved his 25th Billboard Hot 100 number-one song with " My Universe", the second official single of Music of the Spheres. He has written or co-written 25 Billboard Hot 100 number-one songs, most of which he has also produced or co-produced, including Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" (2008), Maroon 5's "One More Night" (2012), Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" and "Blank Space" (2014), and The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" and "Save Your Tears" (2019-2021). "Higher Power" was produced by Swedish record producer Max Martin, whom the band called "a true wonder of the universe". Most of the track was recorded during their first session with Max after that, it was properly recorded and mixed at MixStar Studios, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Ĭoldplay stated that "Higher Power" served as the first "foundation stone" for the Music of the Spheres recording sessions, "provid something solid to build the rest of the album around." During the early stages, the song was recorded at Hansa Studios, in Berlin, Germany due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chris regularly would send the material to the studio where Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman and Will Champion were working together with the album producer Max Martin.
When officially announced, the band posted on their social media that the song "arrived on a little keyboard and a bathroom sink at the start of 2020." Chris explained, "I was trying some other songs with that title, and then one day, in December of 2019, I was playing a drumbeat on a sink and I recorded it on my phone, and then, went and played this keyboard and the song just fell out, landed in, like, ten minutes." The original sink drumbeat percussion can still be heard on the final version of the track. Though its title had already been written down for a while, as the band was waiting for the right song that might fit it, the singer admitted he struggled to find the melody and lyrics to go with it.
In interviews, Chris revealed that the song "dropped out of the sky".
Chris Martin stated that the song is "sort of the beginning of a chapter" where the band have abandoned old rules and concepts established on previous records during its creative process, in favour of working much more freely and singing about how they feel about life, love and the cosmos in general, not having any musical limitations or limitate themselves in any particular sound style. "Higher Power" is the first new piece of music by Coldplay in a year and a half, as the band's eighth studio album, Everyday Life, was released in November 2019.