It takes a village to promote an album, and on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Mariah Carey has at least 10 people with her when she arrives at Electric Lady Studios in New York. There is a makeup person and a hair person, a manager and publicists, a lawyer and what might be a bodyguard, and an entire other group of people who are hard to place. Mariah is tall in high-heeled black boots and perfectly done up, with hair as straight as I've ever seen hair be, two hoop earrings that shimmer from her ears, and a megawatt smile. Everyone is in good spirits, like a winning sports team in the locker room at halftime.
Though this is the kind of infrastructure necessary for celebrity in the 21st century, it's just the window dressing. When things settle down, Mariah and I peel off to a quiet room in the recording studio for a discussion about life and music. The mother of two reclines, puts her feet up on the coffee table, requests red wine for us, and, in the middle of our interview, asks her manager for pizza from an order her team had made. She wants a piece of pepperoni but there are none left, so she happily eats a plain slice, balancing it on her pink-painted fingernails.
When you think Mariah, you likely have an image of the ultimate diva dripping in diamonds, and though she does appear to be wearing some expensive jewels (two butterfly rings on her fingers - one gold, one silver - twinkle in the light), she is welcoming and relaxed here in the studio, eager and engaged when talking about the care she takes in her art. It's something she has not always gotten a chance to discuss, as her level of fame has often inspired more questions from reporters about her dating life than her songwriting process.
Yes, she has been remarkably famous for almost 30 years, and yes, she has had 18 No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. But she also wrote most of those songs, which has not only been a smart business decision but a key to her consistency. Mariah Carey songs always sound like Mariah Carey songs because they always are Mariah Carey songs. Her sound is solid as ever on her 15th album, Caution, her preference for mid-tempo sparkle a constant in a world that moves from trend to trend with increasing speed. She has an uncanny understanding of what suits her sunshine-and-champagne singing voice, which is said to sometimes span up to seven octaves, allowing her to hit that heavenly whistle register.
On a Mariah classic like 1996's "Always Be My Baby", there is a sweetness baked right in, and many of her lyrics over the years conjure a fantasia of honey and heroes and butterflies and dreamlovers. But she's also great with a kiss-off, as she shows on Caution and its lead track, "GTFO", which is about as clear a breakup song as you could hope to have when the next fool crushes your heart. The album is a cool, confident, sexy affair, steady in its pleasures, with standout collaborations with Ty Dolla $ign on the sumptuous "The Distance" and with Blood Orange's Dev Hynes on the lithe "Giving Me Life". And then there is "Portrait", the moment of introspection that Mariah makes sure to have on every record, and which here points to the ups and downs of a life lived in the glare of the public eye. "Where do I go from here?" she asks on the song. "How do I disappear?"
But just because she can be serious doesn't mean that the frothier diva aspect of her image isn't important to her. At a time when celebrities are winning by showing off how real they are on Instagram, there's something fabulously escapist - practically Mae West - about the larger-than-life persona Mariah exudes. She sometimes uses the royal "we" when referring to herself and is memed endlessly in GIFs - melodramatically tossing her bug-eye black sunglasses on, say - with her proclamations and preferences for words like "moment" and "darling" serving as catnip for an internet that loves zippy one-liners. And she knows this. Her mother was an opera singer - the original definition of diva - and Mariah tells me she has as much fun playing up the over-the-top aspects of personality as we have watching.
She is a fighter, too. She had a rough childhood, which included little money and her parents' tumultuous divorce. She also always had the impression, as a biracial kid, that she was a true outsider, a feeling that has lingered into adulthood. As a teenager, she was locked into a record deal with Sony (which her then-soon-to-be and now-ex husband, Tommy Mottola, ran) that helped her become a superstar but restricted her freedoms, creative and otherwise.
It took the entirety of her early career to break out of the contract, with the subsequent 1997 album Butterfly acting as a statement of liberation. She has had to clear her own path a number of times, including after the career-shaking failure of her star turn in the 2001 movie Glitter and its accompanying soundtrack. She then rebounded with one of the biggest hits of her career, 2005's "We Belong Together". Two weeks ago, she got the last laugh when the Glitter soundtrack jumped to No. 1 on the iTunes charts after her fans organized a #JusticeforGlitter campaign. At this point, it seems even her flops are hits.
In an industry that builds up its most glorious stars only to destroy them, Mariah is still a reliable source of joy and happiness for so many. She is a reassuring pop fixture embedded into all of our psyches - tucked in between visions of birthday candles being blown out and bedroom sing-alongs - but she is also a human being here right in front of us, a warm voice that always sounds right.
A lot of your songs have a childlike quality to them, including "8th Grade" on this new album. Why do you always go back there?
That's not a happy song. Eighth grade was one of the lowest points of my life. The year before, I had dyed my hair orange by mistake. I shaved my eyebrows. I had no clothes. Somebody once said in the hallway to me at school, "Oh, she got three shirts in rotation." It was mortifying. But that's because my mom chose to live in predominantly white neighborhoods, where people had more money than us, and I didn't fit in there. Or in an all black neighborhood when my parents were together; as a mixed couple, they had problems there. So there was not one safe place. But eighth grade was also me being like, "Oh, my gosh, I like this kid, and he doesn't like me. That's the end of the world!" You know that feeling. When we were writing that song, I just had this melancholy thing in me, and it still felt young. I just know what I felt like.
What was your childhood like?
It was very difficult. People don't really know about it because I've always been pretty vague, but I've alluded to it in certain songs. "Close My Eyes" from Butterfly talks about it: "I was a wayward child with the weight of the world that I held deep inside/Life was a winding road, and I learned many things little ones shouldn't know." A lot of intense stuff happened to me when I was a kid, that people who grew up with money or with families that weren't fully dysfunctional will never quite understand. And then being biracial on top of it, and having no place to really fit in.
You posted a photo with Colin Kaepernick recently, and people were making stupid comments like, "What does she know? She's white."
This is how many years later? That ignorance level. When you have a black father and then people are calling you white, and then white people are like, "But her father is black," it's very difficult. People don't understand. It's really a hard place to lay.
The radio was an escape for you as a kid, right?
Yeah. I was like, "You know what? One day I'll hear my song on the radio, and that will be a moment."
I read that you literally used to hide under the covers with a radio.
Mm-hmm. When I was a little girl. Very little girl. Like 3.
What were the songs that were big in your mind then?
Probably something from the Jackson 5. I loved little Michael.
Before you hit it big, you lived and waitressed in New York City for a time, right?
By 18, I had left home and was living in the city. Waitressing at the South Street Seaport. I ended up staying with one girl on the Upper West Side. She had two roommates. It was a loft but it wasn't even the size of this mixing board (points to the board in the studio). It was half the size of the board. I had to climb up on the kitchen counter to get in the loft. I still paid $500 a month for that little space.
Were you partying in New York?
I wasn't partying. I didn't even really drink.
Did you want to be famous?
I wanted to be successful. I wanted to never have to worry about the rug being pulled out from under me.
You stipulated from the very beginning that you would perform songs that you yourself wrote. How did you know that was a good idea?
I had seen documentaries about the Beatles selling their publishing, or having it stolen. I had always written songs and, when I was around 18, I was offered $5,000 for all my music and I was like, "No." All these songs that ended up becoming No. 1 songs later, after I got my deal. I was singing background for Brenda K. Starr, and she was like, "You know what, Mariah? I want to do some of your songs. I'll put them on my album." I was like, "You know what? I love you and thank you for hiring me but I'm going to keep my songs." I just believed in them.
Did you miss out on anything being embedded in the pop machine so young?
I missed out on a lot of things and I was enormously blessed with a lot of things. "And I've missed a lot of life, but I'll recover, though I know you really like to see me suffer. Still, I wish that you and I'd forgive each other" - that's "Petals", from Rainbow. In the early part of my success, I was cloistered. I was like a Rapunzel in a castle kept away from the world, so I didn't get to feel famous. I just felt like, "OK, I'll go out there when they tell me it's time to go sing, and then I'll come back here and sit in the house." The beginning of my career was bleak, because I was surrounded by everybody who was so much older than me, and I wasn't really allowed to have fun. The big boys were always in control.
So you really meant it on Butterfly, all the talk about finally being free.
I really meant that album. I still remember the sessions from it, and how I was living vicariously through the music, because nobody was there to tell me, "You can't do this, creatively. You can't express yourself in this way." I just did it. I fought for that for so long. I was able to work with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony on a song like "Breakdown".
I love that you give that song a shoutout on "With You" off Caution.
"Breakdown" is one of my favorites. Just the layering of the vocals and working with, particularly, Krayzie Bone - his style, his flow, just his cadence. I was so inspired by them. I wrote my part, and then they came in and did their part, and we put it together, but I would never have been able to have that experimental time on an album before that. It was hard enough to get "Fantasy" done, because everybody was against that happening.
You've always had great collaborations on your albums. How did you come to work with Dev Hynes on the new song "Giving Me Life"?
I was sitting with Jay-Z and (Roc Nation exec Tyran) "Ty Ty" (Smith), and I was telling Jay a vision that I had for the album, and said, "Is there anyone who you could think of?" He talked to me about Blood Orange, and then I met Dev and fell in love with him. I worked with him here at Electric Lady. He came in to the studio, and I was like, "I just want to work from the inception to the completion of this thing." A lot of times producers or collaborators don't get that I really mean it when I say that I want to be there from the beginning. Dev got that better than anybody. And so, even the drum pattern, we were working at it from scratch together. There's a synth sound on "Giving Me Life" that's like my favorite thing. It just resonated with me. And it was a feel in the studio. It wasn't like anybody trying to show off or do anything but be immersed in the music.
Because of your stardom, is it hard to get people to be casual with you in the studio?
It's always been a struggle, even when I first started making my first demos, and there was no record deal yet. I would be like, "Can you take the strings out here," or "Can you make the drums break down here?" When you're a teenage girl working with what seemed like older people - who were like 25 or 30 - and it was their studio, they are the authority figures. I was producing but I didn't realize that that was producing.
What makes something a Mariah song to you?
I don't know how to define that. I've recently started being like, "Oh, I guess that's very me to do that part right there." It'll be a la-la-la or a shoo-do-do or a da-da-da-da-da. I don't do it to try and sound like a Mariah song, and I love to collaborate with people, but in the rare instances when I've done other people's songs, I haven't liked it. There was a Disney song I did five, six years ago called "Almost Home", and I never really liked it. No offense to whoever wrote it, and I did it because Disney wanted me to do it, but it didn't feel like me at all.
Some of your songs veer close to being schmaltz - how do you know how to walk the line between good schmaltz and bad schmaltz?
After I wrote "Hero", for a while I was like, "Ugh, this song is so schmaltzy, I can't take it anymore." Tommy (Mottola) had said, "Oh, there's this movie, and Luther (Vandross) is gonna do a song, and Gloria (Estefan) is gonna do a song. You want to write the song for Gloria?" I said, "Cool," and then I walked out, went to the restroom, came back, and I came up with the melody and the lyric - (sings) and then a hero comes along - at the same time. I think I wouldn't have written that song for myself. It's got this big, grand melody that actually just came to me when I was walking to the bathroom.
But you of course ended up recording it yourself and it's one of your biggest hits. How'd you keep it from turning too treacly?
There's no modulation in that song. If it had a modulation, it'd be way more schmaltzy. What matters for me with that song is that people really responded to it, and a lot of people who were going through difficult times felt some relief from that song. I knew it was schmaltzy, but now, years later, I see how people at a concert will respond to that more than any of the other songs.
What does it feel like in the body, in the lungs, to hit the notes you are able to hit?
It's a very physical thing. If I slept a good amount, had some days off, been in the humidity, and go out and really perform with strength and a full chest voice, that's one feeling. There's a lot of energy and a lot of power that that has. It's all coming through this area (clutches her throat) but it's all coming from the diaphragm and going up through here (traces a line up her chest).
Does it hurt to hit the whistle register?
When it's at its best, it doesn't hurt. There's two different placements of that part of my voice. There's the "Vision of Love" kind of whistle voice and then there's "Emotions", with those high parts at the end. I remember (producer) David Cole, who passed away. He was one of the only people I used to have in the studio when I would sing because I respected him as a singer. He would push me in different areas where he could actually sing it to me and I would be like, "Oh, this is cool. I like that." If you listen to the song "Emotions," that was him going, "You can do that. Try this." Half the time, I would lose my voice afterwards because he would just push me.
You seem to have fun playing up the diva role. Is it a character?
I mean, look, it's part of me. If you're gonna get dressed up and do a show, why not just have fun and go there?
Give 'em a little zhuzh!
We love a little zhuzh. I tried so hard for so long for people to know that I'm a real person and not this diva thing that they tried to create about me, or this unapproachable person from years gone by. But at the end of the day, nobody cares. They really don't. They're gonna have their perception of you.
You get memed a lot and turned into GIFs. Do you see those?
Some of them, yes. It is what it is. You have to embrace it.
Even when you say the most simple shit, like "I don't know her" about Jennifer Lopez, it gets turned into a never-ending meme.
I really was trying to say something nice or say nothing at all. I really was.
That must be weird, everything being dissected the way it is with you.
I try to stay away from it because you can't drown in that. I don't know how people read comments all the time and then survive.
How did you survive? I ask because a lot of the megastars who came up just a little bit before you, like George Michael and Whitney Houston, ultimately didn't.
It's really about a great support system and working with people who understand and try to create a good environment. Hopefully, those people will also understand stress is really a killer. When we have lost some of our greatest, it's really taken a toll on me, as someone who grew up watching them and being inspired by them. You mentioned George Michael. I remember before my first album, even in high school, the Faith album, I looked at that and said, "I want to make an album that crosses all these genres." We had a lot of things in common in terms of record company political stuff. I remember this one dinner that we had. We were both talking about really difficult stuff that we'd been through. And when he passed away on that Christmas, I couldn't believe it because I thought he would be able to be OK.
There was always this idea in the public of a rivalry with you and Whitney, and then when you ended up collaborating on "When You Believe", you became great friends.
People tried to pit us against each other in the beginning, and I understood that, but I always recognized how brilliant she was as a singer. When we actually met and worked together, we had a great time together. We laughed constantly. We recognized that it's a business, it is what it is. I got her. I feel like I got her. I don't know. I just know that the Whitney I knew was someone I looked forward to hanging out with and having a good time with. She was fun and she was real.
You have some of the most loyal fans in pop, and they recently bumped the Glitter soundtrack to No. 1 on iTunes 17 years after its release. Are you surprised by Glitter's cult status?
I like the soundtrack to Glitter but I avoided it for years.
Why?
Because it represented a time in my life when they almost killed me.
What almost killed you?
I was leaving Sony, I was fighting every day with my ex-husband (Tommy Mottola) who still ran the label, and then I was on a new label. We released Glitter on September 11, 2001, and it was a really bad time. We've had ups and downs.
What does failure teach you?
You know what? If failure means that the biggest selling single of 2001, which was "Loverboy", from Glitter...
It was the biggest selling single from 2001?
Mm-hmm. I'm not mad at it. It represents a moment. It took me a long time to embrace it, but I'm fine with it.
But what does perceived failure in the public eye feel like? Is it humbling? Do you want to hide under the covers?
Definitely hide under the covers. I'm already humble. I was an easy target. The movie was horrible, but there were other people with worse movies that nobody made a big deal about. And I don't think people were ready for an '80s throwback. I was just a little bit ahead of the curve with that. I'm not a person who thinks I'm better than anybody, or greater, or holier than thou, it's not any of that. It's just that then you have to be like, "OK, well this didn't work, how do I prove myself after that?"
What does success mean to you now, with an album like Caution?
The times change. I can't expect that this is going to do 30 million, like Music Box. It's so different now. It was always such a thing where it was like I felt like I had to prove something to myself and to the world. I had to prove that I was good enough to be alive.
To be alive? You thought that?
Yeah.
Until when did you feel that way?
I don't know that I ever stopped thinking it.
You seem like you're in such good spirits nowadays. Are you?
I am when I can be. I mean, there's always stressful stuff, but I love being in the studio. It's my favorite thing. I recorded most of the vocals for Caution at home in L.A. I did a house studio setup, because I have a specially made vocal booth. It's tiny, but it's pink and black with butterflies on it. It's really cute, and I set it up in a room and worked in there with just me and the engineer. And there was nobody else around. There's a line on "Portrait": "Still the same hopeful child haunted by those severed ties pushing past the parasites." That's what it is. There's a person in me that still needs to be true to that little girl who had so much faith, and hope, and belief, and ambition. A need to remain a kid. And I have to love what I'm doing.
(Pitchfork)
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