Mika

Mika’s latest offering, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, is a sonic circus of sorts. It’s classic piano riffs bathed in church choir cadences, harmonized vocals over stop-time drum marches, and hip-hop beats colliding with pop panache, (a la Beyoncé meets the Beatles). Hard to describe but immediately recognizable, the album is very much like the award-winning British singer/songwriter himself: much more than just the sum of its parts.

Mika burst onto the international stage in 2007 with “Grace Kelly,” from the quintuple- million-plus selling album Life In Cartoon Motion. Borrowing the best elements from rock heroes of yesteryear (most notably Queen, Elton John, and the Beatles), Mika’s exuberant, piano-centric sound returns in 2009, marrying razor sharp songwriting with an imaginative arranger’s acumen. At once celebratory and introspective, The Boy Who Knew Too Much is a portrait of an artist firmly committed to telling his own singular story.

On the eve of the album’s release, Mika and I met in midtown Manhattan to talk about the sounds that shaped this new collection of songs.

Well, it’s also a credit to my bad piano playing. [Laughs.] No, but I mean it. I was actually sitting in a very weird dinner for Universal, honoring Doug Morris, about eight months ago. And it was very fancy, and there were a lot of women with a lot of plastic surgery sitting around . . . and that’s only talking about the musicians.

Indeed. And I was seated next to Paul Anka. And he’s talking to me — and he’d never heard my music — and finally he goes, “So, are you a good piano player?” I said, “In all honesty, no. I’m not that great.” He goes, “Then you must be a good songwriter! Anybody who’s too good, when it comes to making pop music, it always gets in the way.”

Now, that’s true and it’s not, because some of the greatest writers in pop music have been amazing players. But there are advantages to playing very simply — to approaching your instrument in a very simple way — you always think of the song, as opposed to the parts. That’s the way I play.

Also, I tend to rely on the piano as a percussive instrument, for pushing rhythm forward, because the subtleties of melodic lines are not something that I can easily bring out in my playing. I do it with my voice, and then I use the piano as a harmonic reference, but more than anything, as a percussive instrument to drive the rhythm. Often, the rhythm is kind of hidden within the piano playing.

Well, in terms of drama, it’s not being afraid to go somewhere. Just because it’s a pop song, doesn’t mean it can’t go places dramatically, and I mean that in a musical sense. There’s a song on the record called “Rain,” and it’s kind of “side-shifting,” keywise, because originally it had to transpose to get into the chorus, and I realized I didn’t want to do that. So it’s all about thinking you’re in one key, then sidestepping and turning the melodies from majors to minors — you start turning things around so that you don’t really know where you’re ending up. Especially on this record, that’s become a little bit of a game to me.

Yeah, it was like a puzzle. When I was writing the song, I fully admit it was like a puzzle. Like “How do I get into this chorus?” and “How do I do it without anybody realizing that we’ve changed the key?”

Harry Nilsson, too! The early Harry Nilsson. Pandemonium Shadow Show, the first record he put out on RCA, which was a commercial disaster. That very kind of taught, tight, pop storytelling, that he was so good at. I think that’s why he became the Beatles’ favorite songwriter, because he was such a master storyteller in his songs. But it’s very simplistic, at least on the surface. Now when I write songs, I try to keep it almost very naïve, and hide the technique as much as I possibly can — because technique never has charm.

In my kind of pop, I always try to make it as simple as possible on the outside. But my references are older. It’s kind of Harry Nilsson, early Elton John, obviously, but not only that. I listen to that, and the biggest relevance I can find to that music, fast-forwarding, is Depeche Mode, or synth-led stuff by the Eurythmics, because all the parts are so simple. But I do kind of run the gamut, and I did come from a classical background, but not as a pianist — as a singer.

Well, [Queen guitarist] Brian May comes to my shows, and I know him — he’s an acquaintance, but we’d never been personal friends, like on an outside-of-music basis. I always wondered why he stayed away from me, even though he always comes to my shows and analyzes.

Finally, the other day, he comes backstage — it had been three years since he last saw me perform. He was kind of muted, and he didn’t know what to say to me. He told me he was weirded out by my piano playing, because although he didn’t think there was a lot of similarity between me and [Queen vocalist] Freddie Mercury, when he heard me play, it was shocking to him how similarly we did play. And he said the drums relied on the piano in Queen, that the drums worked around the piano. So when he heard the dynamic onstage with my band, he was almost to a point of being mute — he couldn’t believe how similar it was.

No, not growing up. Later, yes. I did, and I loved their musical fearlessness. Just because it was pop music, didn’t mean it always had to go, “A-B-A-B-A-B-close.”

Yeah. Well, you didn’t know. It felt completely natural. The best pop is anarchic at its core, because it breaks all the rules. But you never know that when you’re enjoying it — you don’t have to “get” that it’s anarchic to be affected by it.

So much rock music is so banal nowadays, because it all sounds the same. I look at all my favorite artists that made me go, “Oh, I’d love to be like them one day,” and I think of Bowie, and I think of Prince, and I think of Freddie . . . all these people revolutionized things, but kind of through the side door, you know? They were unashamedly populist, but they were also kind of anarchic. I call it “Patti Page Punk.” If you want to do punk, dress up like Patti Page and sneak in through the side door!

Disney soundtracks. I was obsessed with them! Oliver Wallace, the guy who did all the choral and men’s choir stuff on Peter Pan. The Cinderella soundtracks. Kurt Weill, and his Threepenny Opera and Lady in the Dark. That’s the pop music of its day. I mean, I’m not a big show guy. I’m not a big Broadway obsessive. Kurt Weill is probably as far as I go, but I love it. I love that kind of attitude. That was really grungy, Berlin art-house stuff that became massively mainstream.

Obviously, I love Bowie. I love things people wouldn’t necessarily think I would like, as well. I grew up with Bob Dylan. It was the soundtrack of my childhood in a way. I also grew up with everything from Cat Stevens to flamenco. It was really an anti-snobbery. It wasn’t about who was playing, it was just about what the music sounded like. I was very lucky to have that instilled in me.

No, because I think it’s a nightmare to be tuning, and I abuse my pianos.

At the moment, I’ve been changing. I was playing a Yamaha CP300 in the past. Just recently I got a Kawai MP-8 fitted into a sixfoot grand piano shell, which I had custom made so I could dance on top of it. I’m also going to try the new Roland V-Piano — I hear they’re doing some amazing things, and without sampling. I’m gonna see if that’s the sound I need.

For more on Mika, visit mikasounds.com.