About eight years ago, my band started playing our first gigs and reception was...mixed (if my other bandmates are reading this, they're laughing at that last word). Some fans wanted us to play more country, some wanted more metal, some more classic rock, some more original material, some less (or no) original material, and we...well, we liked all of it. We were trying to establish some sort of identity, and we were bummed that our shows weren't the massive successes we'd envisioned them to be ('cause, of course, we thought we were great). We asked a member of another local band, a hugely successful one, what he thought about our connundrum, and he told us, "Man, just play what you play. They'll either like it, or they won't. What's important, is do you like it?" We did. And so we continued to play a mixture of cross-genre covers and a smattering of our own compositions. We decided to be ourselves. To have fun, and just play what we play: George Jones, Metallica, Calico...play 'em all, and let God sort 'em out later.
And he did. He started sorting them right in the door, and we started making pretty good money for a small town, start-up band playing mostly in the sticks. Of course, with this higher level of recognition and popularity (all of which is, of course, relative, 'cause when I said small town I meant it, for our town's population numbers fewer than eight-thousand folks), came the arm-chair quarterbacks (sorry for the football reference; I'm still going through my annual NFL withdrawal symptoms), those who told us that all we need is to get rid of that member and that member, and we'd be on our way up, 'cause that member and that member were holding us back. Well, we fired one member and added another one; he wasn't close friends (at the time) with any of us, as the other member was, but everyone said he was better, so we made the change, and we started to change musical direction.
Someone--I think I know who, but I'm not positive enough of this fact to state it as fact--decided that we needed to establish ourselves as a rock band, a serious rock band, playing the newestlastest in nu-rock, none of that silly "Louie Louie" stuff or that old-fashioned Merle Haggard music. Well, we did that, and we improved as individual musicians, and the crowds began to diminsh. What to do? It must be that we weren't serious enough, and that we weren't completely committed to excellence, and to do that , we'd have to eschew one more member. And we did. And we grew more cohesive, more serious. Sure, it wasn't fun anymore, but a least we were improving, making in-roads, turning into a real band. Subsequently, our crowds diminished from few to none. Really. On at least two occasions, we played to only the bar owner and the bartenders. Both times, we were given a paltry sum for gas money, for we thought the owner felt pity for us, such a great band showing up and playing for nobody. It wasn't until years later that we realized that after those two gigs, we were never asked to play those bars again. Those owners didn't pay us pity money; no, they paid us not to come back.
We soon split for about a year. The new member of the band left, and one former member returned, and we soon started playing again, here and there, mostly for free, and--except for one specific instance--the audiences, while never large, enjoyed us. Heck, we enjoyed us. We started having fun again, while practicing and performing. We were much more relaxed, much less concerned about our perceived image. I think that we innately understood that if we weren't enjoying what we were playing, then our audience probably wouldn't, either.
Mika (British singer Michael Penniman) understands the problems of image and identity all too well. He wrote "Grace Kelly" as an analogy of one his first experiences with a record company, who wanted to fit him in the Robbie Williams* mold. Looking strictly at the basic melodic and instrumental forms from Mika's excellent debut album Life in Cartoon Motion, Mika's songs wouldn't have taken much adjustment to fit into Williams's latter-day, overproduced, Abba/Elton John formula; however, Mika's voice and his vocal stylizations...that's another matter.
Mika has incredible vocal range (anywhere between 3 1/2 - 5 octaves) and power. He's a higher-pitched, less gutteral Freddy Mercury (whom he name drops in the song), with a good helping of disco Barry Gibb thrown in as well. In addition, Mika's vocals are not only dramatic, but they're also unashamedly flamboyant and unabashedly joyful. He rarely sings a lyric straight for any more than a line at a time; he'll start a verse (somewhat) reserved, sounding like Billy Squier, and then--on this song--he'll hit the chorus and trill up the scale, launching into a Chipmunk-like falsetto, before climbing back down, and then immediately back up again to finish off, before he starts the next verse, his voice lower, but still undulating, purposefully wavering, anxious to unleash his spirit.
Mika's joy here--and on his other songs, too, but this one's his best, as the lyrics are smart and witty and the melody's inescapably catchy--is infectious, as one would have to be down in the dour doldrums not to smile at this one, whether that smile comes from laughing at Mika's dramatics (his singing an entire line or two in the highest falsetto he can offer, sounding like Franki Valli in the Four Seasons's cover of Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright"; his breathy phrasing of "Kell-aye;" his feigned pouting) or from admiring his audacity or from enjoying the song or just from trying to sing along. The song's funny, and it's fun, but Mika's no joke. He's a showman, sure, but it's his show he's selling. He plays what he plays. The rest will get sorted out later.
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