With Mika, It’s Pop, but So What?

When Mika began  writing the songs for his fifth album, this autumn’s My Name Is Michael Holbrook, he had plenty of material to draw from. Several close friends had died; his beloved sister had suffered a near-fatal fall; his mother’s health had taken a turn for the worse, and he had taken a revealing trip to his father’s family graveyard in Savannah, Georgia.

He decided he wasn’t going to worry about duplicating the dance-pop hits that had made him a major star in Europe and East Asia. He was going to make a songwriter’s album that would help him make sense of these recent experiences. But as he began to wrestle with the material, his instinctive gift for pop melody proved to be not a hindrance but rather his most helpful tool.

“I don’t believe a songwriter record has to be melancholy and down, all about me, me, me,” Mika says over the phone from his mom’s apartment in Paris. “Because I was dealing with all this darkness, I wanted the songs to be even brighter, even more joyful. It’s pop, but so what? It’s possible to be serious about songwriting in that context. It’s assumed that if something’s dancey or poppy, the lyric writing is less considered, just a collage of different A&R men. That’s not true. I don’t have an A&R man. I start with a blank page, a piano and no expectations.”

A lot of dance pop settles for clichéd lyrics and predictable chord changes, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Think of songwriters such as Prince, Beyoncé, James Murphy, Neil Tennant, Frank Ocean and Robyn, who have all crafted dancefloor hits with sly wordplay and surprising musical twists. Mika may be the most interesting of them all. 

Just listen to “Tiny Love,” a song that appears in two versions on the new album. It celebrates a new love affair not by making it seem bigger than daily life but smaller, more intimate. The song begins with a compressed verse melody, slow piano chords and a breathy vocal that explains that this love isn’t a sunrise over canyons or a lover’s face seen in the stars. “It’s a still-there-Monday-morning kind of love.” At that point, the music explodes into a Queen-like chorus with a brisker pace, fuller sound and sharper hook. “Our kind of love,” Mika sings, “gets better every day.” 

“I knew I wanted to write something that started small and then changed shape, like a landscape,” he explains. “I had this idea that what’s most important to me might not mean a lot to someone else, that I could get high from something as small and worthless as a tiny love. I’m just sitting at the piano with my co-writer David Sneddon; no one cares what we’re up to, and when we go to the bar for a beer, we’re not going to hear any music remotely like what we’re doing. As I started writing, I got excited by the contrast of the tight melody and the clichéd, gigantic gestures of love. That made me feel quite euphoric, and that led to the chorus.”

The song includes the line, “My name is Michael Holbrook; I was born in 1983.” Mika was born that year in Beirut as Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr. When he was still an infant, his mother began calling him Mica to distinguish the youngster from his father. When Mica was bullied at school, his mom pulled him out and hired a Russian voice coach and a Scottish piano teacher when the family moved to London. At age 14, the boy changed the spelling of his name to Mika, because he thought it would look better on the covers of the records he was sure he would someday make.

“Visiting Savannah reinforced the idea that even if I went more to my father’s side of the family,” Mika says, “I wouldn’t change that much. The music that I make is who I am. Nothing else matters as much, not family or any of the countries I’ve lived in. To me, melody is not about where you come from; it’s about who you are. Your melodic idiosyncrasies are your fingerprint, just as the way you walk and move is your fingerprint.”

Mika’s music suggests what Elton John’s songs might have sounded like if he’d hired Ray Davies as his lyricist instead of Bernie Taupin. The infectious hooks and rhythmic momentum would be the same, but they would have been married to witty, subversive stories about the fluidity of gender, the tenacity of prejudice and the immensity of heartache. They would have sounded a lot like Mika’s five albums.

“I read this article by Stephen King about his favorite songs,” he adds, “and my song ‘Lollipop’ was on it. He got the darkness of that song. So from the very beginning, that blend of darkness and melody has been there in my music. The two go together like bass notes and top notes; they really have to. In the pop music I love, the resentment, jealousy, anger and ego are what make the songs timeless. The darkness makes the songs human, and that’s why we relate to them.”