Artist.......: Mika
Album........: Mika Loves Paris
Label........: n/a
Genre........: Pop
Catnr........: n/a
Source.......: DVBS
Rip.date.....: 2016-11-12
Str.date.....: 2016-05-27
Quality......: 220kbps/48.0kHz/Joint Stereo
Url..........: http://www.mikasounds.com/
track title time
1. Mika Loves Paris 100:46
* Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)
* Talk About You
* Grace Kelly
* Rain
* Boum Boum Boum
* Happy Ending
* Elle Me Dit
* We Are Golden
* Les Baisers Perdus
* Good Guys
* Origin Of Love
* Relax, Take It Easy
* Staring At The Sun
* Underwater
* Lollipop
* J'ai Deux Amours
* Love Today
Runtime 100:46
Size 158.95
Release Notes:
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International musical sensation Mika opened his career in 2007 with defining
single Grace Kelly, which sold over 3 million copies worldwide and was the
second British single ever to top the chart on downloads alone. The debut album,
Life In Cartoon Motion, went straight to #1 in UK and 11 other countries, going
on to sell over 7 million copies worldwide, plus over 6 million single sales.
His 2nd album The Boy Who Knew Too Much went top 10 in 11 countries and his 3rd,
The Origin of Love released in 2012, saw collaborations with Pharrell Williams,
Nick Littlemore and Ariana Grande, amongst others.
Mika has been nominated for and won awards from the Brits, the Grammys, the Ivor
Novellos, World Music Awards and MTVÆs Europe, Asia, Australia and Japan,
Capital Radio Awards, Q Magazine, BT, Vodafone and Virgin Media, amongst others.
He is also the recipient of the prestigious French award ôChevalier dans lÆordre
des Arts et des Lettresö.
His contagious joy and colourful performances have delighted audiences from the
beginning and have led to sold out tours worldwide. His videos have racked up an
impressive total of over 250 million views!
Mika has now sold over 10 million records and has Gold or Platinum awards in an
impressive 32 countries worldwide. As well as being a songwriter and performer,
Mika has designed clothes and accessories, is a writer (including magazine
columns, blogs and work on a book), illustrator and artist. He is currently
working on his 4th album.
The story of Mikaàà
Both astonishingly musical and profoundly thoughtful, his tunes combine a heady
euphoric rush with darker unexpected elements: daytime melodramas and night-time
tales of love, loss, abandonment, hope and happiness. Throughout his many
releases, these themes all run together for attention, each one a golden nugget.
Mika is a true young internationalist. Born in Beirut in the middle of the 80s,
MikaÆs family soon found themselves having to move to Paris at the height of the
war. When his father was subsequently taken hostage and held at the American
embassy in Kuwait the family eventually settled in London. An inevitably
turbulent experience for a young Mika, he found himself bereft, lost in the
chasm of a displaced upbringing. ôIt was the combination of moving as well as a
horrible time I had at school in the first few years of living in London that
lead me to forget how to read and write, and stop talking for a little while. I
was pulled out of school for over six months; in order to sort my self out and
find a new school. This is when music really became important. It got me back
on my feet.ö He says now that by the age of 9 he knew that songwriting was his
destiny. The electric performances that would win over some of the most hardened
musical ears on the planet would come later.
ôAfter I started singing as a boy I started to get jobs everywhere. With the
help of a terrifyingly tough Russian singing teacher, I got to be really good at
professional gigs. I did everything from recordings with the Royal Opera House
to the Orbit Chewing gum jingle. IÆll never forget calling up British Airways
to get a ticket, only to be placed in a line, listening to my own voice! That
was a painful 8 minutes.ö
A self-taught piano virtuoso, gymnastic vocalist and born entertainer, Mika has
music in his bones and at a prodigiously young age he was ready to go. Mika
wasnÆt hunched over a radio under his bedclothes or seduced by the glitz of ôTop
of the PopÆsö on the TV screen when he had his first performance awakenings.
Instead, he was catapulted onto the stage of a Richard Strauss opera at 11.
David Hockney was pottering around at rehearsals in the background, with models,
designing the set (Mika still has the poster for the opera on his living room
wall now, signed by Hockney). After near complete social exclusion at school û
ôI wish I could say I was a self-imposed loner but it was imposed on meö û this
was a life he fell in love with, instantly: ôIt was a magical world that you
could live in. A parallel universe for people that is illusory and enchanting
and amazing.ö
ôI grew up listening to every thing from Joan Baez and Dylan, to Serge
Gainsbourg and Flamenco. My musical tastes have become more eclectic as IÆve got
older, but IÆm always going back to great artist songwriters, people who make
great records to their own vision. Prince, Harry Nillson, Elton John, Michael
Jackson. These people make amazing pop records that couldnÆt be performed by
anybody else and thatÆs what I always wanted to do.ö
However, this musical vision might never have been realised. At 19 he left home
to study for an academic degree at The London School of Economics. He quit on
the afternoon on the first day and enrolled at The Royal College of Music two
weeks later. An obsessive songwriter as a student, he would gate-crash parties
and take to pianos to deliver 5 song sets, unannounced. One such occasion led to
an early development deal, which he now sees as essential to his progress as an
artist. Amidst the struggle to get his own voice and vision heard, he wrote what
quickly became his signature song, ôGrace Kellyö, a spoof 4/4 opera set to a
technicolour pop backdrop. ôIt was a f***-off song to people that I was working
with at the time,ö he explains now. ôIt is where the line æshall I bend over,
shall I look older, just to be put on your shelfÆ comes from. I was so angry.
That company had every resource except a soul.ö The infectious pomp and
deliriously catchy chorus of Grace Kelly became a benchmark for where he wanted
to go. ôYou canÆt be afraid to stand out. If no one was going to take a punt on
it, then so be it. I would do it myself.ö
Unafraid to stand alone, his intimate first person and third person storytelling
connect with outsiders while subverting the mainstream from within. Attention to
detail. Personal care and attention. Making sure everything is sitting in the
right place. These are the watchwords at MikaÆs heart. His artwork, developed
with his older sister Yasmine, is the first key that unlocks his work û and the
music will do all the talking. Enveloped in an imaginative musical world of his
own creation, he is one of the few British male pop stars of his age that
doesnÆt run with the pack. Classically trained, racially mixed and prone to
theatrical physical gesture, he has become a scion of ambitiously delivered
self-expression. He says his music can be condensed easily, æthe basic
principals are that it is joyful and empowering and doesnÆt cowtow to fashion or
convention,Æ calling to mind an old and almost forgotten pop notion:
individuality.
If his debut album æLife In Cartoon MotionÆ was the brazen calling card of this
individuality, then its follow up, æThe Boy Who Knew Too Much, was the
maturation of an unapologetic pop sound that he made entirely his own. æMy
biggest mindset when I set about making (TBWKTM) was not to be reactive,Æ he
says, æI had to go back to the start, when people hadnÆt given me their opinions
on what it is that I naturally do.Æ
Second time out, the songs may be different, but the attitude remains the same.
With huge choruses, nods to 40Æs Disney soundtracks and 80Æs synth-pop, up-beat
disco and melancholy reflections on personal experiences, MikaÆs music continued
to be underpinned by an open-hearted and accepting idea of what living in the
21st century means in all its contradictions and complications.
æThe first album, to me,Æ he continues, æwas about childhood. It had that
innocence. For this one we have moved on ten years and into the adolescent mind.
Adolescence is one of the most glorious times in your life. It is when those
life experiences, like sex, drugs and relationships, are still new and
untainted. If I was to think about these things in song I knew that I had to
become more personal.Æ Mika has stepped aside from the character based
storytelling of Life In Cartoon Motion for album number 2. æI still believe in
mystery and I donÆt feel like I have to justify anything about my life anymore.
Because it is all in my songs. Songwriting for me is a way of catching up with
myself.Æ
Part of the beauty of Mika has always been attempting to trace the correlation
of his own personal insecurities or hang-ups into the choice of characters that
he sings about. They often revel in or battle with their own difference,
something he has done since he was a child. That outer layer has been replaced,
but there is no lesser sense of grandeur or intrigue to the new, more open
performer. A generic call to arms for people to throw a little glitter on their
differences and celebrate them has been one of popÆs most tremendous gifts to
music. MikaÆs come with their own unique darkness too.
At the start of 2011, Mika packed his kitbag to travel to Montreal to make his
third record. The music that he had pulsed around the globe as an artist had
been fuelled by ringtone appropriate hooks, streaming out of his musical mind
like twisted nursery rhymes. In Montreal, that was all about to change. The
sounds made by Nick Littlemore, the Australian electronic pioneer behind Pnau
and Empire of the Sun, had caught his imagination and Mika went in search of
this potential new collaborator. æBefore meeting Nick, I was my own taskmaster,Æ
he says now, æI didnÆt know how else to work. I was a 22 year old making up
sounds in the corner.Æ It was just Mika, his piano and his imagination. In the
intervening five years since Grace Kelly went astronomical around the world and
span off two multi-million selling albums and five global tours in its wake, a
personal shift had occurred. As a songwriter and human being, Mika had grown up.
For album number 3, a sensational collection of nimble, multi-faceted and spruce
electronic noise has been fashioned. As a counterweight, Mika found himself
enthralled by the Laurel Canyon sound of the 70s, the airily utopian noise of
pastoral idylls in a new bohemia. These two strands have fused to form a sweet,
harmonious new soundbed for MikaÆs songwriting. A certain lightness of touch has
been found, though always adhering to MikaÆs clever signature rule for the
record: æA lightness of touch does not have to mean a lightness of substance.Æ
Within all this something intentionally intimate emerged. Mika matured into an
artist that no longer needed to hide behind costumery and artifice. In
fashioning this acoustic/electronic sound-clash with Nick in Montreal he
ironically made his most human sound û on The Origin of Love, his imagination
has been fuelled by reality, not fantasy.
æIn a strange kind of way it makes sense. It was about expanding my musical
horizons. Nick allowed me to go somewhere I hadnÆt been before. ThereÆs more
humanity in taking a sound you have made and manipulating it electronically or
digitally than there is calling up a session player and asking them to play bass
guitar for twenty minutes and taking what you want from that and putting it on a
record. I loved the atmosphere Nick curated in the studio. We danced. You donÆt
dance when you are alone. It made me feel endless. It was a great starting point
to be in a studio set-up where everything felt possible and there were no
rules.Æ
A brace of songs emerged in Montreal, fluctuating on the subject of love,
tolerance and joy. First single Celebrate could not be more joyous in its
evocation of the transformative powers of love, a call to arms in a cynical
world. If Celebrate is The Origin of Love at its most straight-up dance-pop,
Lola is the acoustic-driven Fleetwood Mac-inspired flipside given free reign.
He found inspiration from unusual triggers. The rasping build of Heroes was
summoned from reading an A E Housman poem on returning war veterans. The
hypnotic swell of Underwater was inspired by a 90s Michel Gondry denim ad, a
seemingly slight but beautifully realised 90 second polemic on the idea that
when you are in love it consumes you so much you can breathe below sea level.
æThat is exactly how it feels,Æ he points out. æThat undercurrent of ecstasy
will see you through anything. I had removed myself from the isolation of being
alone in front of a piano.Æ
æI am a difficult artist,Æ he says, æI know that. I make artist-driven,
alternative pop music. I do this sincerely, in a time when so many album
statements are incomplete and insincere. I am not from the Brill Building school
of pop. These are my own statements.Æ Inspired by the incredible human emotions
conjured in electronic experimentation by Laurie Anderson and Steve Reich, Mika
wrote his most open-handed and clear love song yet û Make You Happy, opening
with a robot voice repeating the line æAll I want to do is make you happy.Æ It
was released virally as a taster for what was to come. æThis was about people
being able to approach my music clean. The first bit of new music that anybody
heard around the world was sang by a robot. That was cleansing. It is quite
fundamental to the philosophy of this record. My campaigns are slow, sometimes
quite hard. I make alternative pop music thatÆs not easy to promote. But if it
wasnÆt hard then I wouldnÆt be doing it. ItÆs every single fibre of my being.
There is nothing else.Æ
The Origin of Love was a deeply important record in the career trajectory and
personal journey of Mika. æWhat we have done here is joy catching. Every moment
on the record reflects how joyously I feel about my life and what I do.Æ
2014 and the start of 2015 saw Mika working tirelessly on his fourth studio
record, æNo Place In Heaven.Æ Mika enlisted long-time collaborator and Grammy
nominated producer Gregg Wells (Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, Adele, Rufus
Wainwright) to produce the new album. The pair created a mature new record that
exhibits MikaÆs incredible song writing talents and breath-taking vocals,
evoking memories of classic 70s pop albums created by acclaimed song writers
Billy Joel, Todd Rundgren, Elton John etc. The album was released to critical
acclaim in June 2015.
Mika has spent the past couple of years conquering the hearts of audiences
across Europe, appearing as a judge on the X Factor Italy, a coach on The Voice
France and topping the charts in France with the release of ôBoum Boum Boumö.
In addition to his musical achievements, Mika has been working closely with
global watch company, Swatch, as their creative ambassador to create some unique
designs for their collections.
Following the release of the record, Mika went straight to work with a summer of
festivals, a European tour in the Autumn and another season of XFactor Italia
underway, as well as undoubtedly a few surprisesà.. The year ahead is set to be
an exciting one!
RLS-Crc: 42424C5F2D5F4D5033:F6