The idea for Mariah Carey’s 14th album ‘Me. I Am Mariah... The Elusive Chanteuse’, it seems, has been years in the making. The title comes from a painting she created as a small child. “On the back cover of this album is a personal treasure,” the singer told fans in a YouTube reveal at the beginning of the month. “This is my first and only self portrait. I drew it when I was three and a half and entitled it: ‘Me. I am Mariah’. But because this album is a reflection of some of the peaks and valleys that have made me who I am today I’ve decided to share it with those of you who actually care and have been here for me through it all.”
Most of Carey’s albums - by her own admission – are semi-autobiographical. What, then of her latest offering? “Absolutely,” she nods. “As a body of work the album operates on different levels, and I’ve sequenced it so that my fans can really understand my life over the past three years. This album really does have so much of my emotions invested in it, and so much that I wanted to reveal about my life. I want this album to be heard and felt as an experience. I don’t want it to be, like: ‘Here’s another iTunes moment’. This is a real labour of love.”
The new album is a journey into the singer’s private world. The sensual track Beautiful - a duet with Miguel - flags up Mariah’s consummate production skills, while The Art of Letting Go proves, yet again, that the singer is a born lyricist as well. Carey is well-known for her prolific song-writing and producing talents, and this album is a showcase for both. “I am always totally involved with any project I undertake – right from its inception to its completion,” she says. “And I like to collaborate too. If I hear a great pianist or whatever, and I think they’ll inspire me, then I’ll get in touch to see if we can work together.”
During her career Carey has duetted with some of the biggest names in music, including Aretha Franklin, Jay Z and Whitney Houston. This time around, though, Carey’s inspiration has come from much closer to home. One track on the album features her three-year-old fraternal twins, Moroccan and Monroe. They’re not quite old enough yet for a full duet of course, but they happily chip in with a line or two on the song Supernatural. “Yes, they’re both on the album,” Carey smiles. “They love to sing and dance, but whether they’ll want to make a career in music, well we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Carey’s own childhood, however, wasn’t easy. Born and raised on Long Island, New York, the daughter of an Irish-American opera singer and vocal coach and an African-American aeronautical engineer, she grew up dreaming of a musical career. “We didn’t have a lot of money after my parents divorced and we moved around a lot for my Mom’s work. I ended up feeling like an outsider a lot of the time,” says Carey. “But music saved my life, it really did, because I knew I had some sort of talent, and that made me feel as if I was worthy and drove me on to succeed.”
Carey began working part-time as a session singer in local recording studios in her early teens, and was soon writing and producing her own songs. When her self-titled debut studio album was released in 1990 it went multiplatinum, spawning four consecutive No.1 singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, and a star was born. The album also set a template, and the singer is credited with introducing R&B and hip hop into mainstream pop culture. As well as this, Carey’s vocal style and singing ability significantly impacted popular and contemporary music. According to Rolling Stone, “Her five-octave range and mastery of melisma – the fluttering strings of notes that decorate songs like ‘Vision of Love’ - have inspired virtually every other female R&B singer since the Nineties.”
Later in her career, Carey would also be known for popularising rap as a featuring act in her music. “I’m fortunate that I always had cross-over appeal,” she says today. “Vision of Love, my first single, was a No.1 record on both the R&B and then the pop charts, and my heart was in both worlds.
“But I also grew up listening to hip hop, which was unavoidable if you lived in New York because it’s probably the most ‘real’ music on the streets. So it was inevitable that I would combine all these different genres of music that I love in my own work.”
Carey had nailed her musical colours to the mast as early as 1995 with the release of her album Daydream and its single Fantasy where she sampled Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Love and also featured a surprising hit collaboration with rap group Wu-Tang Clan’s O.D.B. With its release, Mariah became the second artist in history and the first female performer to have a song debut at No.1 in the US.
“That record? It’s not for the timid!” laughs Carey now. “I mean, you really had to be into hip hop to listen to that and to get it. And it was so ahead of its time. Genius Of Love was one of my favourite songs as a child, so I just thought, ‘Why not use it?’ And then working with O.D.B was also a dream for me because he made the sort of music that I’d always loved.”
Although Carey produced a second No.1 single from Daydream with the Boyz II Men collaboration One Sweet Day, the way she remembers it now, not everyone at that time was happy about her musical direction – most notably the music executives around her.
“They really didn’t understand my need to do what I wanted to do, so I just sort of snuck those tracks onto my album. And nobody really saw that collaboration coming because, musically, I was considered a sort of very innocent young girl. What it did though, was undoubtedly prove a point to the executives. That being - you’ve got to listen to me because I’m a demographic. I’m a person who really grew up listening to this genre of music, and I want to work with artists who intrigue me.
“Even today my favourite executives to work with are the ones who truly love music; the one’s who’ve also maybe spent time in a studio making albums themselves,” Carey adds. “I love collaborating with people who really get music and perhaps also have the same references as me.”
Carey’s idea of pairing herself - a female songbird - with the leading male MCs of hip-hop changed R&B and, eventually, all of pop forever. It’s now standard for R&B/hip-hop stars like Missy Elliott and Beyoncé to combine melodies with rapped verses. And artists like Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson and Christina Aguilera have also produced music that is unmistakably R&B.
Aside from her pop culture and musical influence, Carey is known for releasing a classic Christmas song – All I Want for Christmas Is You. In the 20 years since it was first released, it’s become a festive regular, and has a tendency to re-enter the charts each December. In the UK alone the single has sold a million copies, making it one of Britain’s all-time biggest hits. And, as well as frequently making it to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Re-currents Chart, the song is a ringtone favourite.
Not bad for the little girl from Long Island who grew up listening to the radio under her bed covers at night, and who would then sit at her school desk the next day dreaming of musical success. But the reality, by now, must surely have outstripped those girlish dreams. Carey is the best-selling female artist of all time with record sales in excess of 220 million copies. She has had 18 Billboard No.1 singles (17 self-penned) - more than any solo artist in history, including Elvis Presley.
As a singer/songwriter/producer, Carey has been recognised with five Grammy Awards, nine American Music Awards, Billboard’s Artist of the Decade Award, the World Music Award for World’s Best Selling Female Artist of the Millennium and BMIs Icon Award for her outstanding achievements in songwriting, to name a few.
Although Carey’s artistic achievements are well-documented, her business acumen is maybe not as widely recognised. She is, however, an astute and highly intelligent business woman who has launched her own brands of perfume and champagne. And Carey also - more or less single-handedly - reinvented the business face of modern music in 2008 by cutting deals with food and drink companies, retail shops and the Home Shopping Network.
But the singer sees no divide between her creative life, her glamorous exterior and her savvy head for commerce. “I’m not the first woman to be involved in the business side of things,” she says. “Look at Marilyn Monroe. She played the dumb blonde very well, but that wasn’t who she really was. In fact she was one of the first women in Hollywood to have her own production company.”
So how important is it for Carey to be involved in the financial side of things? “For me it’s critical,” she says. “I’m in the music, quote ‘business’, and we have to sell music, as well as create it. So that’s given me a different outlook on things over the years. And don’t forget that I can’t just quit the job of being Mariah Carey. Everyone else can go home at night, or take another job, but I live and breathe this and I can’t suddenly quit being who I am. So the business side of making music, especially, is very important to me. When you’ve put so much of yourself into making an album, you obviously want as many people as possible to hear it. And I guess I’ve always had that kind of view because even when I signed my first record contract as a teenager, I insisted that there was a clause in it which stipulated I would not be forced to do other people’s songs. I wanted to write my own material and express myself in that way. I was lucky that I’d watched so many TV documentaries on the music business – they gave me a real insight into the pitfalls.”
Carey, too, was one of the first personalities to use Twitter and Facebook for publicity purposes and has always been at the forefront of connecting with her millions of fans by using social media. “Personally I love the fact that it’s so immediate and lets you reach so many people so quickly,” says the singer.
From another perspective, though, Carey can recognise the potential grey areas of the World Wide Web. “It’s a bit of a double-edged sword in some respects,” she concedes. “It’s kind of foiled the music industry forever, which is a shame. If we had just sat back and said, ‘Maybe let’s figure this internet thing out,’ it could be something cool, we could have found a way to distribute music online on our own terms, not somebody else’s.
“Prince had already shown the way,” she suggests. “He was so far ahead of the curve, putting out his own records on the web.”
If Carey, in the past, has ever considered launching her own record label, the question seems somewhat redundant now. “I hate to say this, but in my opinion the truth of the matter is that artists aren’t going to need record labels very much in the future, and in fact we’re almost at that point now. So I hope they come up with some kind of superhero who flies in and saves the day and returns the industry to how it used to be,” she says. “But, either way, what any label needs, I think, is a really, really good executive. The sort of executive who can spot an artist’s potential, and then go on to shape and mould and support that person. To me, that’s the most important thing because there’s a lot of talent out there waiting to be nurtured. You only have to look on YouTube to see that.”
As well as her music, equally important to Carey are her philanthropic causes, and the singer is co-founder of Camp Mariah (part of The Fresh Air Fund) which enables inner-city adolescents to explore educational and career opportunities while enjoying camping adventures outside the city.
She’s also a keen supporter of the Make-a-Wish Foundation, a charity that grants the wishes of children who have life-threatening illnesses. In fact her work - mostly with youth-related charities - has earned the star a Congressional Horizon Award. “I’m blessed to do what I love for a living, so it’s always been important to me to try and give something back,” she says.
Carey has been at the top of her game for almost 25 years in an industry that famously takes no prisoners. So looking back, to what, if anything, does she attribute her own? “I think that longevity is something that’s difficult to obtain in this business because a lot of it is about trends,” she says. “But a trend, of course, lasts for a moment and then it’s gone. Typically, the artists who transcend that have a certain voice, as well as a catalogue of songs, that people have grown to love over the years. I guess they really do become ‘the fabric’ and the soundtrack to the lives of a generation. So it’s one thing to have some success in music and another to maintain that success. It’s difficult, it really is.”
With the release of Me. I Am Mariah ... The Elusive Chanteuse this month, it appears that the ‘soundtrack’ won’t be ending any time soon. “This album is really me,” says Carey. “It’s from the heart.”