NEW YORK – Platinum selling singer-songwriter Mika reveals exclusively to USA TODAY that he's planning to mark the 20th anniversary of his debut album, "Life in Cartoon Motion," which released in 2007 with the catchy single "Grace Kelly."
"We're doing something quite glorious," the singer, 42, teases. "I can't say too much about it now, but it's going to go around the world."
Mika, born Michael Penniman Jr., says that when he created the LP, he was "looking for freedom." The artist was born in Lebanon, but conflict in the country forced his family to Paris. At age 7, Mika's father was on a business trip to Kuwait and "effectively taken hostage in the American embassy" during the Gulf War. He was able to return home to his family after eight months. But Mika reflects that his father came back "a different person."
"Our life fell apart in Paris," he continues. Mika remembers his family piling into a Toyota Previa ("the most wonderful, ugliest car ever made in the history of cars") and moving to London after the ordeal. "I got kicked out of school and that's when I started doing music.
"I was looking for a way of finding color, finding love, finding joy, putting it into my life and then making sure that it would be part of my daily life," Mika says of his debut album, released when he was 23. "That was why I wrote that first album. It's as simple and as complicated as that."
