Rainbows and lollipops are the stuff of preschool picture books, little girls' birthday parties, and one pop singer's candy-coated career. Mika burst on the scene last year with an effervescent debut album and matching uber-aesthetic - a diligently Day-Glo approach to everything from album art and website to live shows and, most critically, his irrepressible pop songs.
If there were an award for extreme branding, the Beirut-born, London-bred musician would win it for "Life in Cartoon Motion." As it is, the album is up for four major honors at this year's Brit Awards; Mika has assembled a team of his own designers and choreographers who've spent two months concocting a razzle-dazzle look for his performance at the Feb. 20 ceremonies.
"I watched that show as a kid and always said, 'I could do it better,' " Mika says. "I'm going for it."
And that about sums him up. The 24-year-old Mika, born Michael Holbrook Penniman, set his sights on stardom as a child. He studied voice and soloed at Royal Opera House and sang a chewing-gum jingle. Clearly he consumed the complete catalogs of Queen and Elton John, although he prefers Rufus Wainwright and Harry Nilsson as touchstones. He pounded the pavement for years, knocking on countless music-industry doors and enduring countless rejections (famously from "American Idol" impresario Simon Cowell), all of whom wanted him to be something other than himself.
He documented the experience in a song called "Grace Kelly" that, in a turn of events that feels a lot like poetic justice, was one of the biggest hits of 2007 in the United Kingdom.
"Why don't you like me?/ Why don't you like yourself?/ Should I bend over?/ Should I look older?/ Just to be put on the shelf?" Mika ponders over a jaunty bass line, pounding piano, tap-dancing beats, and sunshiny harmonies. He slips frequently into a stratospheric falsetto, here and elsewhere. It's the icing on a Technicolor mash of disco, pop, pomp, and camp that has topped the charts in nearly every corner of the globe except the one where Mika's recently arrived for his second tour, which stops in Boston tonight for a sold-out show at the Orpheum Theatre.
"He's a bold writer, super talented, but there's not much gunpowder running through that record," says Greg Wells, the album's producer, who has worked with everyone from Pink to the Deftones. "Americans like music with a little gunpowder in it."
"Life in Cartoon Motion" has sold nearly 5 million copies worldwide, compared to roughly 300,000 stateside. Like Robbie Williams, Scissor Sisters, Kylie Minogue, and other flamboyant pop acts who've found great fame overseas, Mika doesn't seem to translate here. That's not to say he doesn't have devoted followers. R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe is a self-proclaimed fan. When Boston radio station MIX 98.5 started spinning "Grace Kelly" last year, listener response was strong but limited.
"The people who loved it really loved it, but lots of people didn't get it," says MIX music director Mike Mullaney. "I put him in a group with [recent British imports] Kate Nash and Lily Allen, who are very, very clever, very British, and almost too cheeky. Someone as fun as Mika will never play in the red states."
Mika is a level-headed fellow, and his failure so far to conquer the American pop scene isn't, he claims, a great disappointment. He notes that he's playing larger venues each time he visits, that his sales pattern here is one of steady growth, and that he feels no need to outsell Justin Timberlake.
"You can't look at the States the same way you'd look at Norway," Mika says. "It's a massive country, and there are so many different types of people with so many different opinions. As long as I get some understanding."
But it seems that not many understand "Life in Cartoon Motion" the way Mika intended it: as a themed collage concerning childhood and the transition from innocence to adulthood. The bubblegum artwork and gleeful melodies, which Mika confesses veer toward nursery rhymes, were crafted in the service of what he's dubbed his "schoolyard album."
Interestingly, school wasn't a happy place for Mika. Displaced by the war in Lebanon, his family fled Beirut during the height of the war, first for Paris and then London, where Mika was bullied so badly that he stopped talking and stayed home for six months. That's when, in his turbulent young teens, music changed from passing interest to lifeline.
"Life in Cartoon Motion" isn't so much the sound of Mika's youth, but rather the soundtrack to the refuge he sought and found in Japanese pop and Jacques Brel and nearly everything in between.
"1920s crooners, flamenco, Nina Simone . . . it was a gamut that fascinated and confused me, but it wasn't a bad confusion. It gave me a cowboy-like attitude toward the arts," Mika says. "And it got me back on my feet."
Now that Mika has established such a signature sound with his debut album, one wonders what it will be like to try to move on. He's already written a handful of material for his next project and says that while it'd be easy to continue on the familiar and well-loved path, he's in "an entirely differently place. There's a great variety of sound. The process is insane," Mika says. "I can't really tell yet."
Wells, who's been asked to return for Mika sophomore effort, has listened to a half-dozen new songs. "He was so true to the cause of telling his story on the first album," he says. "The compass was always so fixed on that, and I would say these songs are a logical continuation but more soulful and more authorial."
Whether it will play in Peoria is anyone's guess, and of not much concern. Mika's gift, Wells says, "is that he's unfalteringly himself."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, go to boston.com/ae/music/blog.
