2010 - Interview for Keyboardmag

[Dreamy_Queen]

Droopsy your on fire .. another great interview ..

 

The interviewer got hold of the Freddie likeness and didnt let go

 

Anyway I'm always interested in what Brian says about Mika. All in all, Brian is a great authority for me.

[suzie]

Mika is soooo humble when he says he's not that great at playing piano! because we all know he's the greatest piano player ever

 

I think the Mika you know might be different from the one I do...

 

but he IS a great musician for sure...

Edited February 3, 2010 by suzie

[mikalollipop_karla]

:wub2:

[Miro]

Interesting one! T4P

[kaatje066]

Thanks for posting this interview Droopsy. I find it very intersting to read what Mika says about his music. I wish there were more interviews like this

[sienna]

Thanks for posting!

Another interesting interview.

 

these are the best questions to do,let him talk about music,that´s his way!!

 

I really agree with that!

 

Thanks for posting Droopsu

its very interesting. Mika is soooo humble when he says he's not that great at playing piano! because we all know he's the greatest piano player ever

 

Maybe he knows what he's talking about in terms of education, but I love to listen when he's banging along and playing around with the music on his piano!

[willywonka]

these are the best questions to do,let him talk about music,that´s his way!!

 

You're very wise for a newbie...

 

I think the Mika you know might be different from the one I do...

 

but he IS a great musician for sure...

 

[silver]

Good interview - and the mystery of standing on top of the piano solved

[Blue Sky]

This is one of the most interesting articles I have ever seen about Mika:wub2:

 

Well found, Droopsy!

[laura*]

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

 

[marian538]

Are you going to tour the album with an acoustic piano?

 

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

 

WHAT??? No acoustic piano????

[RAK1]

I caught this on Twitter, and tweeted him about it. About the part he spoke about the grand piano keyboard being kitted out by the Kawaii, quite relived he wasn't actually dancing on top of a finely tuned piano.

And how he continually talked about the percussive element of the piano, the amount of people who think it's a stringed instrument, baffles me. So I was chuffed when he highlighted that.

[Louiza]

An interview that is all about the music. Fantastic:biggrin2:

 

t4p droopsy:flowers2:

[Louiza]

And how he continually talked about the percussive element of the piano, the amount of people who think it's a stringed instrument, baffles me. So I was chuffed when he highlighted that.

 

The piano is definitely a stringed instrument. If you open it and look inside you'll see the strings. But you can emphasize on its percussive element and play the rythm instead of the melody of the song just like Mika said.

[LilStar]

i feel so silly, i was about to say that the guy LOVED to talk about piano, until i realized it was for Keyboardmag

 

T4P good interview!!

[lollipop_monkey]

It sounds like he's referring to the piano he had on the acoustic tour, since he was dancing on top of that one every night. I never in a bazillion years would have imagined that was anything but a "proper" piano - it sounded real to me! (Not that it's much of a feat though, my musical knowledge is dismal at best).

 

Exhibit A:

 

Nice work, Mika.

[RAK1]

The piano is definitely a stringed instrument. If you open it and look inside you'll see the strings. But you can emphasize on its percussive element and play the rythm instead of the melody of the song just like Mika said.

 

My music teacher, who was a piano player, told us that it is a percussive instument.

If you notice, the little beaters hit the strings, like you would hit a Glock ot Xylophone.

Edited February 4, 2010 by RAK1

[laura*]

It sounds like he's referring to the piano he had on the acoustic tour, since he was dancing on top of that one every night. I never in a bazillion years would have imagined that was anything but a "proper" piano - it sounded real to me! (Not that it's much of a feat though, my musical knowledge is dismal at best).

 

Exhibit A:

 

Nice work, Mika.

 

The sound can be very good, even better than a cheap or abused real one. Anyway, the sound of an instrument can vary a lot.

[suzie]

The piano is definitely a stringed instrument. If you open it and look inside you'll see the strings. But you can emphasize on its percussive element and play the rythm instead of the melody of the song just like Mika said.

 

My music teacher, who was a piano player, told us that it is a percussive instument.

If you notice, the little beaters hit the strings, like you would hit a Glock ot Xylophone.

 

A piano has strings but so had Pinocchio...

(sorry for the silly joke:biggrin2:)

 

I also think it is a percussive instrument.

[lollipop_monkey]

The sound can be very good, even better than a cheap or abused real one. Anyway, the sound of an instrument can vary a lot.

 

That's what I was thinking too after reading that - that a real piano likely would have gotten pretty beaten up being toted all across the continent.

 

You play piano, yes? Have you ever used any of the digital pianos Mika mentions in this article? If so, what did you think of them?

[laura*]

That's what I was thinking too after reading that - that a real piano likely would have gotten pretty beaten up being toted all across the continent.

 

You play piano, yes? Have you ever used any of the digital pianos Mika mentions in this article? If so, what did you think of them?

 

I don't know the right words to explain this in English.

 

The sound is sampled using the sound of a real piano. Technology allows you to have a very good sound out of a fake piano. It can be so good that you're not able to tell it's fake. But unfortunately it doesn't work for classical music. Modern keyboards have got special keys now, "weighed", they're almost like the keys of a real piano, but if you can play well, you will feel the difference.

I rented a "weighed" keyboard ages ago while I was on holiday and I'm really happy that I can afford to have two "normal" pianos at home.

[Shine]

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.

 

One of the things that struck me when I heard the new album is that while you’re obviously a piano player, the songs aren’t locked down ‘piano songs.’ I think that’s a credit to your songwriting.

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.

 

You have to learn how to speak your mind.

 

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.

 

But I think your piano playing and your sense as a songwriter are very orchestral. Some guys play and sing in one place, either vocally or on the piano, as if they’re staying in their comfort zone. But your comfort zone seems to be all over the instrument.

 

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.

 

You like to experiment. . . .

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?”

 

You’re 25, but a lot of your references are decidedly old-school. I hear so much early Elton John and Queen.

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.

There’s a real rootsy, go-for-broke kind of element in your piano playing, even though you downplay it. I guess that makes sense given that your template is people like Elton, and the way Freddie Mercury played piano.

 

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.

 

Did you listen to a lot of Queen coming up?

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.”

 

We take for granted how much they stretched the boundaries of what pop music could be about at that time.

 

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!

 

Who were some other major influences when you were coming up?

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.

 

Are you going to tour the album with an acoustic piano?

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

 

So what kind of rig will you play onstage?

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.

 

http://www.keyboardmag.com/article/mika/January-2010/107441[/color]

 

These kinds of interviews I really love to read. So creative, unique, it always opens his comprehension of pop music and music, playing, singing and songwritting at all. One of the best quality of his song writting is in his amazingly changing keys, and he just points it out. T4P once more.

Edited February 5, 2010 by Shine
typing

[lollipop_monkey]

I don't know the right words to explain this in English.

 

The sound is sampled using the sound of a real piano. Technology allows you to have a very good sound out of a fake piano. It can be so good that you're not able to tell it's fake. But unfortunately it doesn't work for classical music. Modern keyboards have got special keys now, "weighed", they're almost like the keys of a real piano, but if you can play well, you will feel the difference.

I rented a "weighed" keyboard ages ago while I was on holiday and I'm really happy that I can afford to have two "normal" pianos at home.

 

Ahh, interesting! That's what I was wondering, how it would be possible to make a digital piano "feel" like a real piano. I guess there's only so much they can do in that area, even if the sound is quite good. And I suppose in Mika's case the sound is more than adequate, since he's not exactly performing complex classical pieces.

 

Thanks!

[Kumazzz]

Keyboard magazine

https://www.keyboardmag.com/artists/mika