Videos: Mika about the songs from the album The Origin Of Love track by track

To me, it's simply the agony you get after your love story when wrong and you just want to die because you can't have your loved one... The track is quite strong and show the anger/sadness towards the other person.

 

Have you never wanted to die for a failed love story?

No, not really.

No, not really.

Me neither, I guess us Dutch girls are not the suicidal types

I can still relate to the general emotion in the song though. Have you tried turning up the volume, standing in the middle of you room all alone and closing your eyes while listening to that song?

Me neither, I guess us Dutch girls are not the suicidal types

I can still relate to the general emotion in the song though. Have you tried turning up the volume, standing in the middle of you room all alone and closing your eyes while listening to that song?

Not yet. But I will as soon as our cd-player is fixed. And then I will let you know the update on my liking the song or not!

I´ve always said I prefer the demo,but now I can´t remember it anymore

No matter how hard I try, I can´t remember that song...damn... I need to dig in the hard disk to find it...

I´ve always said I prefer the demo,but now I can´t remember it anymore

 

No matter how hard I try, I can´t remember that song...damn... I need to dig in the hard disk to find it...

just go to YT

ME!! I was about to write that... I expected a bigger, deeper story for Overrated, it seems more important than what he actually showed us.

Thought so too. But as some have said you don't need that story and it's up to Mika to tell us it if he wanted to our not. But what I really missed was he telling us how it evolved from the demo to the song it is today. That's the story I want to hear.

just go to YT

Oh, yes, I know... I just find odd how my mind works... I´ve been listening to that demo for AGES and know, I listen to this new song DURING A MONTH and I forget the other one...

[YOUTUBE]RKOMoeBsQjQ[/YOUTUBE]

Amazing! I would like to hear more about how he feels about this song though. I have a weird feeling that one of the reasons he doesn't want to perform it live (yet it would seem) is either because the lyrics are so dark and heartbreaking or because it's hard to sing the choruses. Hmmm...

take your time

could you do it for the Celebrate's transcription as well??? (there are parts missing on the last paragraph, my ears aren't good enough to hear Mika speaking sometimes )

I'm not Christine, but I had some time and wanted to see the Celebrate video again, so I made some corrections to the transcript you had. Hope that's OK

The song Celebrate was a bit more of a journey. It started off as me and Pharrell Williams working in Miami on a song that was called ‘’China Boy’’. And that song has a pre- chorus that went "When I wake up, I feel better, and I pull myself together, I remember those two letters, It will be OK," which is… very Pharrell (be OK). And then it had this little moment in the breakdown of this song that went, you know, this song is no matter how miserable I am, it doesn’t matter 'cause, I'll get the whole world to celebrate, and, that was the heart of almost everything… and we start to build up the song, and the song just started getting kind of more and more built up.

The chorus is actually to me one of the most interesting parts of the whole song, because it’s not a traditional chorus. You build up, you build up, you build up, you got this verse ‘’Once I get up, I feel better’’ as a pre as well and then you get to the chorus and you think it's going to go there, but it just stops and it teases you and it’s more about a posturing than it is a big statement. And this is made up of a synthpad and then an electric guitar which is sampled to go, to arpeggiate, so, it's like you play the guitar part and then you chop it up so instead of going dididi, it goes babapa and then we double it. So it goes babapa, babapa, babapa, babapa, babapa, and this is the result, of all these little layers coming together to form something that feels groovy.

It’s a fun song, it has all these different layers. It has a bunch of really healthy influences, and it got mixed by a guy called Serban Ghenea in America, and the result is this. It’s not supposed to hit you over the head, it's got a lightness of touch about it, which means that a record like this can sit nicely next to Origin Of Love and next to Lola, even though it clearly has more, you know, of a dance-y intention. That lightness of touch was really important. I kept on saying it to Angie and to Serban and to Greg Wells. I was just like, just kinda like, nothing's gotta slam you in the face, 'cause nowadays everything slams you in the face, and I was like, you know, it wasn’t, it was not a commercial decision, it was just something that felt… classy.

I'm not Christine, but I had some time and wanted to see the Celebrate video again, so I made some corrections to the transcript you had. Hope that's OK

big thanks Deb ^^

OVERRATED

Following all the […] back, this whole album has twelve love songs. Overrated is, it’s a heartbreaker song, the lyrics are quite brutal, it goes, you know, ‘’I breath out, I breath in, will you please just throw me living off the depend while I’m sleeping and kill me in my sleep, because I realize that love is overrated in this godamn world, and, everyone talks about it, but it’s nonsense, it only makes you miserable’’ This is the most electronic song on the record, but there’s a real […], just the way the first melodies climb up in this weird… scale, it’s all about intention, the song start like this… and it make me think of ''Tron’’ movie soundtrack as well… it twists… and then again we start to climb... and I’m screaming. There’s no beat, there’s nothing, it’s quite a classical song, in it’s intention, it’s quite, it almost goes like a classical melody, the way it climbs, the way the chorus goes, and by the end of it, you’re in the top of a different […] scale, which is pretty […].

 

you're welcome (they're not complete btw, any native english speaker to help me???)

OK, I love doing this when I have time. I just don't always have time.

But here's Overrated:

Following on from the theme that this whole album is 12 love songs... Overrated is, well, it's a heartbreak song. The lyrics are quite brutal. It goes you know, will you just -- I breathe out, I breathe in, will you please just throw me living off the deep end while I'm sleeping, and kill me in my sleep because I've realized that love is overrated in this godddamned world. And everyone talks about it but it's a load of nonsense and it only makes you miserable.

This is THE most electronic song on the record, but there's a real theatricality to it, just the way that the reverse melodies climb up in this weird scale. It's all about tension. The song started like this... and it made me think of Tron the movie soundtrack as well... And it twists... and then again we start to climb... and I'm screaming... there's no beat, there's nothing. It was quite a classical song in its intention and it's almost like a classical melody, the way it climbs, the way the chorus goes. And by the end of it you end up in a very different landscape, which is pretty stomping...

 

you're welcome (they're not complete btw, any native english speaker to help me???)

STEP WITH ME (revised)

The song ‘’Step With Me’’ was written in a castle in France, by a fireplace, with Hillary Lindsey, the Nashville writer who wrote "Jesus Takes the Wheel’’, which is an amazing pop song, and also with a young writer and programmer and producer called Billboard. The... we were all there actually for a songwriting camp. We weren't just hanging out in castles like… people who hang out in castles, playing lord and lady...

We were there because Miles Copeland, the former manager of The Police, holds this songwriting camp, where every day you are paired up with different writers that you’ve never worked with before. You get put into different rooms of the castle, and you write a song and you record it and by the evening, you have to all to sit in the grand hall, all like 50 of you, the youngest, coolest, best writers in the world, that they could put together at that time, and you play your demos in front of everybody, of the song that you wrote that day, and there’s no excuse, you have to play something, even if it sucks. And it’s funny because sometimes people get put into like the big hall or the grand rooms and they come back with these big songs. They get put into different rooms and the songs that come out are different... We got put in the little cottage with the damp and with the mice chasing everywhere and the ceiling falling in, and we were trying to keep this fire lit in the corner of the room 'cause we were freezing, and Hillary Lindsey had a horrific hangover from about, three boxes, no, 'cause they weren't bottles, there were wine out of a box, of cheap wine, and so the song that we wrote was comforting, sweet and short, because we didn’t want to spend too much time on it. And so, ‘’Step With Me’’ is the result of those limitations.

It’s kinda light, it’s got this stroking, summery, hazy quality to it, it’s a daydream, that’s what the song is, it’s a daydream. The pre-chorus goes, "this love is delicious like home-cooked dishes that I’m tasting mischievously’’. And then we get into the instructions so… step one…step two… step three, I’m calling you baby, three steps away from me, step four…step five… three steps, three steps… and then you’re back in.

On the record, Hillary Lindsey is doing the backing vocals. On Popular, Priscilla Renea is singing with me. On different songs there’s different people, singing with me, and they're not really ‘’featurings’’, sometimes they are, but not always. It’s just that it’s what happened because I wrote a lot of this record as I recorded it, it’s just what happened, and so I thought it was normal to let the people that wrote the record with me, who are my friends and who I had fun, with be on the record as well.

Thank you very much for the transcriptions, I usually get the general meaning,but there are always important words missing, so, thank you very much!!

KIDS (revised transcript)

The song Kids is probably the most Californian of all of my songs. There is a Californian ray of sunshine across this record, in a kind of Beck sort of way, also in a kind of, I don’t know. Laurel Canyon-inspired way. In Kids you hear that and it’s like, 'Look at us having this argument on this side of the road. On this side of the road, there’s you and me, and we’re fighting. On the other side of the road there’s a bunch of kids playing in the setting sun on a Californian side street in the middle, in the middle of Culver City. Look at us and look at them, and look at what we’ve become and look at where we came from, and is there a way that we can fix this?' And then it goes, and there’s also a little bit of resentment towards the kids on the other side of the street, 'cause I go, 'Kids, what do they know about life? Nothing at all! They think they know everything, but they know nothing at all!' And it's like I’m angry at them and I’m in spite of them simply because I’m jealous. Because I look around this adult life and I’m like, you know, 'This is us, look where we were.' The reality is that being a kid is pretty horrible most of the time, but that’s kind of where Kids started from.

I worked on it with Nick Littlemore, and I wrote it with him, and, originally the song as a chorus was supposed to be for Luke and him for the Empire of The Sun record and I never actually played to Luke in the end, because we had worked on another song for the record called ‘’Good Times’’ so in the end I was like, 'you know what? I’m keeping this one for myself.' It makes me happy, so, it's a nice relief on the record.

Big thanks for revising the transcriptions Deb

Big thanks for revising the transcriptions Deb

Oh, you did all the hard work, Bia, I'm just refining them.

Here's POPULAR (revised)

POPULAR

Popular is a song that uses a melody and bit of the chorus from a song by the same name obviously called ‘’Popular’’ from the musical ‘’Wicked’’ which is written by Stephen Schwartz. I first met Stephen Schwartz about three years ago and he came to the studio and listened to my second album and we just started talking. And although we've never actually written together, I sent him a e-mail one day saying, ‘’You know I really like your song Popular, and, would you mind if I played with it a little bit, and flipped its meaning around to mean something else? I have a lot of respect for you so I won’t kind of like make fun of it, but just, will you let me go with it?’’, and he allowed me to. And the result is really, this bizarre exchange between me and my collaborator and co-writer, Priscilla Renea. We did this in the States. And we're talking about our experiences at school. This is really the only song that really kind of harks to my childhood.

It sounds like a soundtrack to an animation like The Simpsons or something and it’s very consciously that way, and you've got the... and Priscilla sounds like such a restrained sense of naughty humour in everything that she does, but she’s got a voice that sounds like a young Michael Jackson. I love the French horns in the back that are going pom-pom-pom, pom-pom. And then the…. It's like a slingshot -- we're waiting, and then, we’re about to let it go… now!

When you mix influences like Beck and the musical Annie together you can’t go wrong, or you can only go wrong, I don’t know, same difference.

Has anyone made a transcription for Lola as well??? If not, I made one, here it is

LOLA

Hi, I’m Mika and we are at studio in London, at Hoxton Square and this is my engineer Angie, who’s gonna help me kinda go through each song in this album and talk about each song, how I wrote it, why I wrote it, and also how I recorded it and what I like about each song. This song is called Lola, it started off as a chorus and the chorus was ‘’Lola, I’ve made up my mind, I’m not gonna fall in love this time’’ and that was it, there was nothing else.

I liked the idea that I’m having this conversation with this ‘’friend’’ called Lola and I’m saying, you know, ‘’I had it, I’ve decided, you’re right, I’m not gonna fall in love this time’’. There’re wasn’t really pretty much of this. We kinda wrote and produced this in a space of four hours in a hotel room in Miami, a studio in a hotel room in Miami and we started with this. And the idea of that groove is simply because it sounds like Fleetwood Mac with a little bit of Billie Jean and the bass line we programmed in, because we tried to use real bass, but it really didn’t sound very good. The reason why the bass didn’t sound good when we tried to play it was because we didn’t have a bass player, we didn’t have a budget for a bass player, so we did try to play it and it was crap, we put the bass with a plugin, playing like this, that was like garage band record, but it doesn’t sound like that, it sounds, it sounds kinda slack vintage, maybe cause it’s so badly done, badly for well, and then the piano on it , is similar to piano that it’s on Origin and that’s all about just, I guess with me and everyone who I’m playing all the time with in this album, I was like ‘’How about we just play with what we need to?’’ and in fact it’s kinda cool.

For some reason, when I was writing this, I cap done telling and producing it again happening at the same time, I cap done telling this feels like, I feel like I did when I wrote Love Today , I don’t know why, but there was just this thinking about that made me feel that way, I guess when I was working on this section, particularly, I felt like that. That’s Lola.

Has anyone made a transcription for Lola as well??? If not, I made one, here it is

Just a few slight tweaks, Bia

LOLA

Hi, I’m Mika and we are at a studio in London, at Hoxton Square and this is my engineer Angie, who’s gonna help me kinda go through each song on this album and talk about each song, how I wrote it, why I wrote it, and also how I recorded it and what I like about each song.

This song's called Lola. It started off as a chorus, and the chorus was ‘’Lola, I’ve made up my mind, I’m not gonna fall in love this time.’’ And that was it, there was nothing else.

I liked the idea that I’m having a conversation with this ‘’friend’’ called Lola and I’m saying, you know, "I've had it, I’ve decided, you’re right, I’m not gonna fall in love this time." There wasn’t really much else to it. We kinda wrote and produced this in the space of four hours in a hotel room in Miami, in a studio in a hotel room in Miami, and it started with this. And the idea of that groove is simply because it sounded like Fleetwood Mac with a little bit of Billie Jean in there and then the bass line we programmed in, because we tried to use a real bass, but it didn’t really sound very good. The reason why the bass didn’t sound good when we tried to play it was because we didn’t have a bass player, and we didn’t have a budget for the bass player, so really we tried to play it and it was crap, and so we ended up using a plug-in in like Ableton or something, which is like, playing it like this... that was like a garage band record, but it doesn’t sound like it. It sounds, it sounds kinda slick and vintage. Maybe because it’s so badly done. Badly, but well. And then the piano on it is similar to the piano that’s on Origin, and it’s all about, just... I guess with me everyone always assumes that I’m playing all the time, which I do, so with this album, I was like, ‘’How about just playing when we need to?’’ And the effect is kinda cool.

For some reason, when I was writing this, I kept on telling -- and producing it -- 'cause, again it happened at the same time -- I kept on telling everyone, this feels like, I feel like I did when I wrote Love Today. I don’t know why, but there was just this thing about it that made it feel that way, I guess it was when I was working on this section, particularly, that I felt like that. That’s Lola.

I know we only have the audio so far on this, but I thought I'd transcribe it -- I really, really hope we get the video eventually.

Make You Happy

On Make You Happy, I was really kinda fascinated by the idea that you could have such an emotional statement like, "All I want to do is make you happy," and you would assume that -- it sounds like a, I don't know, like something Streisand would sing. But instead of Streisand singing it, it sounds like this: "All I wanna do is make you happy, All I wanna do is make you happy, All I wanna do is make you happy." So you're being told that, you know, I really want to love you, all I want to do is make you happy, but it's coming out of the mouth of a robot. For some reason that only kind of made it feel more real. And it made it feel more effective.

Make You Happy went through various transformations. This is one of the first versions that I worked on. In this version, what becomes kind of obvious is the fact that the song is in 3/4, right? So it's a waltz, which is not necessarily, well, which is not at all a good tempo, or a good time signature for a pop song. It's very unusual. But it means you can do something like this... It's like something out of a Bond film. So instantly by using a time signature that's a waltz, you enter a pretty cool sonic world. It sets it apart from the start.

Make You Happy is a very, very thought-out love song. It is a pop song with a lot of classical influences. It's a pop song with a very kind of like controlled sadness to it. It's like, all I want to do is make you happy and all you want to do is make me NOT be. And sonically it was really hard to nail, because of how the chorus is so simple. And the chorus is literally this flat, little message. It doesn't jump up. It doesn't go in a million different directions. So for me it was all about finding, you know, a version that could just sound like a song and take you to places and deliver a chorus, even though the chorus didn't really go anywhere. So what we ended up with was this kind of patchwork of sounds and to me it sounds really exciting. It is experimental. But I really love it. It definitely takes a few listens. I won't say that. It kind of gets stuck in your head. It's like a mantra.

I wrote Make You Happy with an artist called Fryars who, in all honesty, I discovered through the internet and I went to hear his music at his mom's house and sat on his bed and his mum made us tea. And I listened to a whole bunch of stuff and my ears started burning, 'cause I got excited and when I get excited by what I'm listening to even in a gig I start to get really hot ears. And he played me this thing that was just this loop that went "all I wanna do is make you happy all I wanna do is make you happy" with the rhythm come crossing against it and I was just like please, please can we do something with that? From there it went to Greg Wells... it went to Nick Littlemore... it got mixed by Serban Ghenea. And it traveled around in my backpack on a hard drive until it was finished.

And in the interest of being thorough, I went back and had another look at the transcription for Stardust, and made a few little refinements to that.

Stardust is a song that I did with Benny Benassi. And I met him and he walked in with his cousin Alessandro Benassi and we were working in London and he played me a bunch of things that he'd been working on, but actually the first thing that he played me, in this kind of 25-minute rundown of what he liked and what he'd done recently that he thought would be appropriate, was a track, and instantly I just started to singing along to it.

The song was written in about an hour. It’s called Stardust. It’s pretty shiny pop and it’s just, you know, I love this sentiment of, you know, "I don’t know if I’ll see you again, but I can’t get you out of my head.’’ And, you know, I know how to -- it’s kinda like Make You Happy -- I know how to make you happy. Why don’t you just let me change your life? 'Cause I will do anything, even at the expense of my own to change your life’’. And I took the track to Nick Littlemore, we added a few tiny things on it and one of those things was by bringing in a percussionist from the London Symphony Orchestra and he played marimba along with these Benny Benassi hardcore electronic parts and we blended them together with some acoustic guitars and stuff just to round out the sound so that it would feel a bit more like a record that comes from my universe, and the result is just pretty joyful.

The one thing I'll say about this song is that the chorus is so hard to sing, it’s so high, it’s just so high, so God help me when I have to sing it live.

I have to remember to watch this one on our TV downstairs -- we can watch video in 3D.

A big thanks to BiaIchihara for all the transcriptions an Deb for correcting them!!!

A big thanks to BiaIchihara for all the transcriptions an Deb for correcting them!!!

you're welcome

@Deb I was about to post the transcription for MYH when the video is out on YT, as I couldn't get everything he said on that audio file, but I saw you've beaten me to that, thanks for posting it and thanks again for correcting my transcriptions

what a great job girls!!!

 

@Deb I was about to post the transcription for MYH when the video is out on YT, as I couldn't get everything he said on that audio file, but I saw you've beaten me to that, thanks for posting it and thanks again for correcting my transcriptions

Thank you for taking the time to get this all started! I'm sure it's helpful to anyone who wants to translate into another language for the other fans.

As for Make You Happy, I just loved listening to Mika talk about it -- I was excited to hear him say things that I thought myself about the song, especially how "alliwanndoismakeyouhappyalliwanndoismakeyouhappy" is like a mantra. That's how I always interpreted it.

Anyway, like I said before, I really want to see the video for this -- hope they don't forget about it!