Here is what Mika has to say about each of the songs in “Life in Cartoon Motion”:

Grace Kelly

I wrote this song as a little sticky to the music industry a couple of years back.

I was working with a big music company in London that wanted to mould me into what they felt would turn me into a commercial success, which was Craig David at the time.

They told me I needed to make a record more like what everyone expected pop records to be — and be like Craig David.

I knew that would lead to complete disaster. So I came back home and I wrote Grace Kelly that night. From that point on, I made a decision to write in the way I wanted to and not how someone else told me to.

Lollipop

This was a message to my little sister, telling her not to have sex too soon — because it would mean something very different to guys than it would to her — and so be very careful.

But I had a lot of fun getting my message across in the melody and lyric!

The little girl is my cousin, one of the most hilarious girls I have ever met. So when the opportunity came up to use a child’s voice in Lollipop she was the only person I had in mind.

I put her up in a snazzy Hollywood hotel and she was completely spoilt for about four days, like a true star.

My Interpretation

This is a break-up song. It’s hard to write this sort of song. They often sound quite fake or trite so I guess I’ve Mika’ed it up so it still sounds like a good song with a darker lyric.

Love Today

I was really happy when I wrote this and when I’m in that kind of mood I always hope everyone else feels the same way.

Everybody is looking for the same thing — to love someone and be loved back. Or just to get laid. It all depends on how you look for it.

Love Today captures that, the euphoric feeling you get when those things go right.

Relax (Take it Easy)

I always wanted to write a dance song that wasn’t a really full dance track, that felt organic. So when I came into producing Relax I made sure that most of the sounds we used were actually made by real instruments.

We used some great session musicians who had worked with Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson.

And we picked up the strangest pedal combinations to get all these weird sounds.

It’s really effective . . . you can’t tell if it’s a full dance track or really laid-back. It feels a bit weird electronically.

The organic-ness gives a more classic field to it. So it was one of the harder tracks for me to produce, but also the most rewarding.

Any Other World

There is a little spoken introduction that many people may miss.

It’s a family friend of mine who lost her eye during the war in Lebanon and I realised in everyone’s life their comes one point — or several points — where something happens and you have to completely change the way you have lived your life because of one event.

And it really makes you readjust and rethink and rejudge parts of your life all over again.

That happens to some people in a dramatic way like Rafa who lost both her eye and her husband within six months. Or it can be in a much quieter way like when you are 22-years-old and you finally leave university after being in education all your life or when you lose your job.

I wanted to put that in the song, because when you’re 68 or 14, it’s still the same feeling and it’s still just as hard.

I wanted to try to capture that quite difficult period that people have to go through at least once in their life.

Billy Brown

I just thought it was a brilliant story to put into a pop song — the idea of a man leaving his wife for another man. I really don’t know why it hasn’t been done before.

When you’re writing songs, you always want to play with intrigue and you always want to pull certain strings. The point of writing pop music is that, in a way, you can write about anything.

And it’s amazing how many younger listeners really love it and really