Dick Van Dyke sat in his living room, 99 years old, and asked Chris Martin to write him a song about old age. Within two minutes, Martin had one. What followed was less a music video than a private document of something rarer: two people from entirely different eras of American and British life finding out they share the same language, which turns out to be the one about holding on.
The official directors’ cut of Coldplay’s ‘All My Love’ opens with Martin and Van Dyke attempting the song’s chorus together, side by side. Van Dyke is a beat behind, cheerfully off-key, and entirely unbothered. Martin laughs and offers to take it up the octave. They try again. ‘Well, it’s in the right city!’ Van Dyke says of his own singing, and that line captures the whole register of what this is: warmth without sentimentality, honesty without embarrassment.
What love actually is, according to someone who’s had it a long time
At one point someone asks Van Dyke directly: what is love? He pauses, laughs a little at the size of the question, and then answers it plainly. ‘It certainly is a feeling of caring about the welfare and the life of the other person as much as you care for yourself,’ he says. No poetry, no performance. Just a man who has clearly sat with the answer for a while.
He pulls out photographs from the family’s first home in California. There is Carri Beth, born there. Chris is the oldest. Barry. Stacy. The images are handled with the casualness of someone who has looked at them ten thousand times and still finds them worth looking at.
The song itself runs through the whole weather of a life shared: low, high, sunshine, snow. The lyric Van Dyke singles out is ‘let me hold you if you cry, be my one two three forever, until I die.’ He says it twice. ‘So beautiful.’
The part where he mentions he could go any day now and seems fine about it
Van Dyke mentions, with the same ease he uses for everything else, that he is acutely aware he could go any day. ‘But I don’t know why it doesn’t concern me,’ he adds. ‘I’m not afraid of it. I have that feeling, totally against anything intellectual, that I’m going to be all right.’
Before the final performance, Martin asks everyone in the room to close their eyes and think about all the people who have meant something to them. The music plays. Then there is applause, and Van Dyke jokes about passing out and taking a nap.
Then comes the moment that earned its own round of disbelief from everyone present. Someone dares Van Dyke to name a subject for a song, right now, so Martin can compose it on the spot. Van Dyke says: old age. Martin sighs, laughs, and starts playing. Within seconds: ‘Old age is hard, say it over town, everything I wish went up started going down. Gravity is winning and it’ll win some more, things that used to stay up hard start dragging on the floor.’ Van Dyke shouts ‘Oh my God, that’s great!’ Martin keeps going, the song building toward a verse about greying hair and dancing in the cold and a request that everyone come back when Van Dyke turns 100. The room erupts.
One photograph on the table
The family photograph from the California house sits there through the whole afternoon: four children, one first home, no captions needed.
By the time Martin sings the last verse of ‘All My Love’, the promise in the lyric has already been demonstrated in the room. Van Dyke called it luck, what he has had in his life. ‘I got to do what I do,’ he said, ‘play and act silly.’ The song agrees.
