A complex childhood and a difficult first marriage were mere stumbling blocks on the road to success for the singer-songwriter and global superstar. She talks to Frances Hedges about overcoming adversity, embracing her diva reputation and why she's proud to be producing music that comes from the heart.
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"Can we get those curtains closed?" asks Mariah Carey, gesturing towards the window in the Corinthia's penthouse suite, which, on the evening when we meet in the midst of a London heatwave, is awash with glorious sunlight. It is well known that Carey, a night owl, is most comfortable under the cover of darkness, so I hastily oblige before we settle down for our chat. Who am I to argue with a music icon?
And a bona fide icon she still is. Last night, I watched her stride onto the stage at Wembley Stadium for the Capital Summertime Ball, where she performed classics including We Belong Together and Heartbreaker with a pitch-perfect vocal that had lost none of its power over the decades. As the 80,000-strong audience - many of them pre-teen girls - belted out the lyrics to Hero, swaying from side to side with lit-up mobile phones aloft, it felt to me as if no time had passed since the era when Friday nights were for watching Top of the Pops and Sunday afternoons were for tuning into the radio chart show. "It's funny - someone just showed me a clip of me doing that song back in the early Nineties, and there was a little girl in the audience I hugged," Carey tells me now. "And then last night, I gave a stuffed toy to another child who was watching. It's amazing, really, to think of these two girls from different times, both about five years old and both hearing my music."
Carey is speaking to me after a day of shooting for Harper's Bazaar (suffice it to say, wind machines were involved) and is reclining on a sofa wearing white Fendi pyjamas over a plunging black bra, with six-inch Gianvito Rossi heels on her feet. So far, so on-brand. Working out how much of her attitude is real and how much belongs to an extremely well-constructed media persona is near impossible, but what does feel honest is the affection she has for her fans, who call themselves her ‘Lambily' (it was a toy lamb that she handed out last night). Some celebrities resent the intrusion of audiences into their personal life; Carey genuinely seems to welcome it. "I really like to see fans in person - there's something very special about that," she says. "There are ones who have met me here at the hotel, who have come to almost every place where I've performed; they even have tattoos of me. They're part of my life."
Her return to the UK stage this summer - as well as yesterday's performance, she has a Heritage Live show at Sandringham in August - coincides with the release of Carey's first new music since 2018. Type Dangerous, the debut single taken from her forthcoming album, is a synth-driven, R&B-heavy record with a catchy chorus and playful lyrics referencing various categories of unsuitable man (Mr Player, Mr Racer, Mr Dealer and so on). "We wanted to have a laugh - it's tongue-in-cheek," she says, adding quickly: "It's not like I based the characters on anybody." At the other end of the musical spectrum, she had joined forces with two other powerhouse singers, Barbra Streisand and Ariana Grande, to record the stirring feminist anthem One Heart, One Voice for Streisand's latest album. As for her own, fans can expect "an eclectic mix" of styles and songs, from fast-paced and mid-tempo to ballads that sound "sad yet triumphant".
"Sad yet triumphant" could be a synopsis of her life, as she chronicled in her 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey, co-written with the journalist Michaela Angela Davis. "Working on it together was challenging, but it was also therapeutic," she says. "We stayed up late figuring out how we were going to put the story forth." She also narrated the audiobook in its entirety. "I knew it was going to bring up bad memories I didn't want to relive. It was a tough situation to go to sleep listening to it. I'd wake up and be kind of freaked out. Because this is me and I went through that."
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What "little Mariah", as she calls her in the book, went through makes for difficult reading. Born in 1969, she grew up in a run-down house in a predominantly white area of Long Island; her mother, a white Irish-American opera singer from Illinois, and her father, a Black engineer from Harlem, separated when she was three. At school, she was bullied for being biracial. The threat of violence and presence of drugs were recurring themes throughout her childhood, from outside and within her family. She claims in the memoir that her now-estranged brother dealt cocaine and tried to extort money from her (he has filed an ongoing lawsuit against her for the allegations, which he denies), and that her late sister once inflicted third-degree burns on her with boiling-hot tea. In this dysfunctional atmosphere, listening to the radio and writing songs gave her solace, and - encouraged by her mother - she made up her mind to pursue music as a career. "We didn't always have the world's greatest relationship," says Carey of her mother, who died last year on the same day as her sister, "but certain things she said or did resonated with me as a kid. She once told me: 'Don't say if I make it, say when I make it.' That just stuck with me, and I never gave up."
While it's still a highly competitive industry, Carey thinks that aspiring musicians today have an easier shot at making their dreams come true. "Now, people can buy a microphone and light themselves and film themselves," she points out. "Anyone can be their own celebrity by just going viral." Back then, by contrast, "if you wanted people to hear your music, you had to get a record deal." In her case, she did what she had to do: she moved to New York City, took waitressing shifts to pay her rent and used any spare cash to cover the costs of going into a recording studio. Steady work doing background vocals started to come her way until her big break in 1988, when she got her demo tape into the hands of Tommy Mottola, then the president of Columbia Records (and later the CEO of its parent company Sony Music), at a party. The next chapter of her story is all too typical of the misogyny embedded in the history of the music business: Mottola took Carey - who was 20 years younger than him - under his wing, married her in a glitzy ceremony befitting the excess of the Nineties, and then effectively held her prisoner in a purpose-built mansion in Bedford, New York.
"Sometimes I feel angry about that time, but I think I've made peace with it - in any case, I vowed I'd stop talking about it," Carey says, when I ask how she feels about the way she was treated. If she does refer to that period of her life, she tends to put a light-hearted spin on it. "Humour is my release, and people who know me know that. I'll make little jokes about what happened because otherwise I could make every day a sob story." She gives a tight smile. "It's a coping mechanism, but it's in my nature to laugh."
One of her frustrations about Mottola's controlling influence was the way he tried to pigeonhole her as a mainstream pop artist. "I wanted to do more R&B, more urban music, and any time I would bring that up, it would get shot down," she says. "It wasn't that I didn't like the music I was making - I just felt there was more inside me that I wanted to release." Only once she brought out the 1997 album Butterfly, with its hip-hop elements, did she sense that she was being true to herself ("I felt free for the first time"). By then, the couple had already separated; they finalised their divorce in March 1998.
Mottola had deliberately shielded his wife from the scale of her success, desperate to convince her that she could not survive without his support. She tells me about an instance when, a few years into her recording career, she travelled to Schenectady, New York, to record a televised Thanksgiving concert; the streets were crowded, and she realised that the security in place was there to manage the sheer number of people who had come to see her. It was the moment she recognised she was famous. "And that was just shocking, because nobody had ever told me, 'Hey, these people are outside the store, and they all want to buy your record'," she says.
Despite this, liberation from Mottola did not instantly equate to a flourishing professional life. There was the embarrassment of her role in the 2001 film Glitter, which was widely panned (though it has since enjoyed a fan-led renaissance), and the poor sales of its accompanying soundtrack. Carey underwent a period of hospitalisation for exhaustion - which she implies in the memoir was unfairly orchestrated by her brother to resemble a full emotional breakdown - and she was dropped (and paid off) by EMI barely a year after signing a contract for a five-album deal.
Whatever the circumstances of her temporary downfall, it was soon to be eclipsed by a spectacular renaissance: The Emancipation of Mimi, a celebration of her identity as a Black singer that featured a slew of collaborations, including Snoop Dogg, Pharrell Williams and Jermaine Dupri. This year marks the album's 20th anniversary, which, in the run-up to the release of her new music, she has been promoting with a collector's edition featuring various bonus tracks.
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I wonder whether, as she embarks on the promotional circuit for yet another comeback, two decades on from the previous one, she still cares about the critical reception of her work. "It's nice when people say good things and give you a good response, and then if they don't like it, and they don't say good things, you have to be able to push that away, let that go, you know?" she muses. "Because why, at this point in my life, would I really be worried about that stuff?"
Indeed, Carey - a five-time Grammy winner who has sold more than 220 million records worldwide and has 19 number-one hits to her name (second only to the Beatles) - is unlikely to be dethroned any time soon. She has embraced, and reclaimed, the term ‘diva' so wholeheartedly that, when I ask her which female divas she admires, she responds decisively: "I'm going to have to go with me!"
Later, she reveals that she enjoys the songs of Tate McRae, Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo - but only because she likes to keep up with what's on her teenage daughter's playlist. Other than music, her children are, she says, the major loves of her life. Moroccan (‘Roc') and Monroe (‘Roe') are 14-year-old twins from her marriage to the former America's Got Talent host Nick Cannon, which began in 2008 following a whirlwind courtship and ended six years later. (She is now rumoured to be dating the musician Anderson .Paak, though she will not go into detail on this, other than to acknowledge that she is "a romantic".) With Cannon - who has fathered 12 children and last year shared that he had been diagnosed with "narcissistic personality disorder" - she co-parents the twins. "How do I say this? They spend time with him, and they have a good time; they spend time with me, and they have a good time," she says carefully. "I want to make sure I'm always fair about the situation because it's tough to grow up with divorced parents."
Her idea of downtime is either "a day in bed" (she is, famously, not an early riser) or going on a trip to one of her favourite places. "Somewhere with beautiful water - I love Capri for summer," she says - and then, giving me an opening, "and Aspen for Christmas". The mythology of Carey the Christmas fanatic is well established; growing up, it represented her fantasy of the perfect family ritual, and she cherishes it to the point of obsession now. "I can't believe I have this song that I ended up writing randomly," she says of All I Want for Christmas Is You - the track from her 1994 holiday album that makes her about £2 million in annual royalties alone and finally took the number-one spot in 2019. "Christmas is everything. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't get to celebrate."
The degree to which she cleaves to her persona - the holiday spirit, the diva mentality, the head-to-toe designer gear - is impressive, but doesn't it ever get exhausting? "It's part of my job," she retorts. "What's the point of a disguise? Just get up, get dressed, go out. If I don't want to be seen, I'll stay home." It helps that she simply refuses to accept the idea that she is getting older. "I don't allow it - it just doesn't happen," she says. "I don't know time. I don't know numbers. I do not acknowledge time - I have a new song that starts with that line." As well as trailing new music, she is working on a documentary about her life and a scripted series adapted from her memoir. I doubt that she will ever retire, but, once again, she has a quip ready: "I might go hang out with Santa Claus in the North Pole." If Mariah Carey wants Father Christmas to exist, I'm sure she'll make it happen.
(Harper's Bazaar)
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