sombr's 'My Body Isn't Ready' and Coldplay's 'Yellow': A Shared Pace, No Sample

sombr's 'My Body Isn't Ready' matches Coldplay's 'Yellow' in speed and in little else we could measure. In our tests it runs at about 89 beats a minute and 'Yellow' at about 86, but the two are six semitones apart in key and open on different instruments, and Coldplay's 'Fix You' shares more of its chord moves than 'Yellow' does. It does not sample 'Yellow', and sombr is its only credited writer. The songs meet in the words instead, where both use skin and swimming.

The comparison is almost as old as the song. Three days after its release on 25 June, a small YouTube channel uploaded a mashup that laid it over 'Yellow' and titled it 'My yellow isn't ready'. Of the 1,325 comments YouTube returned for the official video on 10 November (UTC), 74 name Coldplay or 'Yellow', nearly three times as many as mention the mirror in the chorus. Google suggests searches such as 'sounds like yellow', 'vs yellow' and 'does my body isn't ready sample yellow'.

Does sombr's 'My Body Isn't Ready' sample 'Yellow'?

No. The Warner Records listing on YouTube Music names one writer, Shane Boose (sombr's real name), and two producers, sombr and Tony Berg. A track built on part of 'Yellow' would normally credit the four members of Coldplay who wrote it. The listing names no other songwriter at all, which also bears on the other sample question in Google's suggestions, about 'Red Swan'.

We also split sombr's official audio into four-second slices and searched the whole of 'Yellow' for the nearest fit to each, scoring tone colour and pitch at once; smaller scores mean a closer fit. The lyric video, which carries the same recording, scored 0.24. 'Yellow' got no closer than 0.97, in line with two songs we added purely for comparison, Coldplay's 'The Scientist' at 0.94 and Conan Gray's 'Vodka Cranberry' at 0.98. The test only finds copies of a recording. sombr's own orchestral version, the same song played again a whole step lower, scored 1.03. A part of 'Yellow' replayed, or moved to another speed or pitch, would slip past it, but no such borrowing appears in the credits either.

Skin and swimming: where the 'My Body Isn't Ready' lyrics meet 'Yellow'

sombr first teased the song on TikTok on 20 June with a caption saying it came from feeling too insecure about his body to act on wanting someone. The chorus puts that in eight words, “I like you, but my body isn't ready”, and the next line makes the mirror the thing that stops him. The first verse happens on Independence Day in the United States. His friends head for the water and he stays home, and later he wishes the person he likes would stay over but is afraid of the light. In the second verse, he is out of school, has met someone new and wonders whether she only likes him for what he does.

At 2:18 the bridge asks, “If I could crawl out of my own skin, would you let me in?” He then wishes they were children again, when he might have been able to swim. 'Yellow' uses the same two pictures facing the other way. In its chorus someone else's skin becomes beautiful, and in its second verse Chris Martin sings that he swam across for the one he loves. In Coldplay's song the body belongs to the person being admired. In sombr's it is his own, and, as we read the bridge, it is what keeps him out of the water.

In the comments, 82 of the 1,325 use the word 'body', 30 talk about insecurity or dysmorphia and 21 mention the July holiday of the first verse.

Key and BPM: F major at 89, against 'Yellow' in B major at 86

'My Body Isn't Ready' runs at 89.1 beats a minute by our beat tracker's count and 'Yellow' at 86.1. Wikipedia gives 'Yellow' 88; Hooktheory's user transcriptions give 90 for sombr's song and 87 for 'Yellow', the same three-beat gap we measured.

Our key finder and Hooktheory's transcription agree on F major for sombr's song; for 'Yellow' the finder reads B major, which is also the key Wikipedia lists. F to B is six semitones, the interval called the tritone, and no two keys are further apart. In our test of Olivia Rodrigo's 'the cure' against Foo Fighters' 'Everlong', the keys were only a semitone apart. Conan Gray's 'Vodka Cranberry', the other song in Google's 'sounds like' and 'vs' suggestions, is in F major too, at about 92 beats a minute.

The orchestral version sombr filmed at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, uploaded on 17 September with David Campbell as arranger and conductor, keeps the pace at 89 but moves the whole song down a step, to E-flat major. Every chord we read in it is two semitones below the same chord in the single.

Chord progression: closer to 'Fix You' than to 'Yellow'

The chorus of 'My Body Isn't Ready' turns on four chords, G minor, B-flat, F and C, a loop that music theory writes as ii, IV, I, V. To compare songs in different keys, we listed every run of three chords in sombr's track by the shape of each move rather than by letter names. There are 24 different runs. Run through the same count, the lyric video shares 23 of them and the orchestral version 18.

'Yellow' shares 6, as does another Coldplay song, 'Paradise'. 'Fix You' shares 11 and 'The Scientist' 4, while 'Vodka Cranberry' shares 10. sombr's own 'back to friends' shares 1. These are common moves in pop, so one shared run proves little, and the counts give no reason to single out 'Yellow'.

What song does it sound like? In overall sound, 'Paradise', of the six we tried

Our sound classifier, which labels each section with instruments and styles, put 'Christian music' among its five strongest guesses in all 13 sections of sombr's track and 'Gospel music' in 9. It picked out piano in the opening seconds and choir in the choruses. None of its top guesses was guitar or rock, though the credits list guitar by Meg Duffy and sombr. The lyric has no religious line, so we read those labels as a description of the sound, layered and hymn-like voices, rather than of the subject.

For 'Yellow' it reported strummed and plucked guitar in the first 11 seconds and a 'Grunge' or 'Rock music' label in 9 of its 13 sections. In overall tone colour, sombr's song is nearer 'Paradise' and 'Vodka Cranberry' than 'Yellow', and 'Yellow' was not the closest of the six songs in any of the eight sections we compared.

'My Body Isn't Ready' on the charts: a UK peak in week 19

'My Body Isn't Ready' rose from No. 10 to No. 9 on the Official Singles Chart for 6 to 12 November, its best place yet, in its 19th week, and the midweek update for the following week had it at No. 6. On the Billboard Hot 100 dated 14 November it was No. 42, down from 34, also in its 19th week. Spotify plays passed 162.6 million by 9 November in kworb's count, about 1.24 million of them on the latest day.

Of the national Shazam top 100s we read once a day, up to 70 of them, it was in 20 in our read of 11 October (UTC), highest in Belgium (3rd), Austria (4th) and Croatia, Czechia and Italy (5th). Austria had it first in three daily reads in a row, from late on 22 October to 25 October (UTC). In our read of 10 November (UTC) it was still in 18, fifth in Austria and Czechia and ninth in Denmark.

Only a handful of the 74 comments that name Coldplay or 'Yellow' say where in the song they hear it: four point to the opening, where our classifier hears piano in sombr's song and guitar in 'Yellow', and two to the verses. Of everything we measured, only the speed lines up closely; in the words, the two songs share two pictures, skin and swimming, and turn them opposite ways.