The song has a standard format of alternating verses and choruses, but what stands out is the irregular phrasing within the verses. The most standard phrase length in pop music is eight bars. Coldplay’s phrases are six bars long, with the third phrase of verse one being offset by one bar, making it only five bars long. This irregularity gives the lyrics a free, dreamy quality that pushes the genre more to the alternative end of the rock genre. While the instrumental parts, verses, and choruses each have different instrumentation, they stay consistent each time the individual section is repeated. The instrumental sections always have electric and acoustic guitar accompanied by a steady drum beat, the verses both have acoustic guitar, a simple drum pattern, bass line, vocals, sparse electric guitar, and faint cello, and the choruses use an intensified drum beat, backing vocals, and an eighth note pulse on the keyboard. The changes that occur in these repeated sections are subtle, such as the addition of a few distant backing vocals in the second verse that aren’t present in the first.