It’s early afternoon on a Thursday in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and despite his cool manner, Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr. is feeling nervous. Not because of this interview -- he’s been speaking to members of the press for over a decade at this point -- but because in just a few hours, he will be donning his stage name, Mika, and returning to perform in the States for the first time in over three years.
Mika says the album was written over the course of the last two and a half years in "real time," as he continued to learn what it really means to be a grown-up. "I really wanted to address the idea of growing up without losing your colors," he says. "Becoming an adult, but without losing your human warmth, or your sense of color and whimsy ... those things are seen as things that you leave behind. If anything, I think they're things that you have to claim even more.
So, during his hiatus from the music business, Mika worked on creating a sound that was purely authentic to him, and untouched by his perceptions about what is current and trendy in pop music -- is that vision realized. "I have completely abandoned any kind of worry about what people may or may not think about my music. I have absolutely refused to mimic the sonics of anything that is mainstream," he says, adding, "While still remaining within a pop context, of course.
Mika wasn't surprised that his team trusted him with the decision, though — despite his aforementioned contempt for the music business, he contends that his record label, Republic, has always endorsed his "weird" vision, despite any questions regarding popularity or sales numbers. "They kind of see me as this completely atypical artist," he says. "There's this sense of pride from them ... and so they're quite supportive of me.
And yet with his success on that single, quite literally written about how trying to compare himself to others simply doesn't work, he was heralded by many as the new Freddie Mercury . Even with a song about individuality, the star felt his talent was being reduced to a need by those in the industry to identify him. "Therein started this tension between me and the idea of the music industry," he says.
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