Mariah Carey's debut
"It was incredible, like in a movie," Mariah Carey said the other day. The 20-year-old singer and songwriter from New York City was recalling the moment a year and a half ago when she was discovered by Tommy Mottola, the president of CBS Records, who has made her the company's pop Cinderella of 1990.
This week her debut album, "Mariah Carey", was released by Columbia Records with more fanfare and promotional hoopla than the label has bestowed on a new young talent in years. "Vision of Love", a single that was released three weeks before the album, has already climbed to No. 38 on Billboard's pop singles chart.
"Mariah Carey" introduces a pop-gospel voice that is impressive in its power and range and that has elaborate vocal embellishments strikingly reminiscent of Whitney Houston's. In fact, Narada Michael Walden, one of three producers who worked on Ms. Carey's record, also produced Ms. Houston's 1985 debut.
The singer, who lives with two cats in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, is one of three children of Patricia Carey, a vocal coach who used to sing with the New York City Opera. Mariah Carey's parents divorced when she was 3. In 1987, she graduated from Harborfields High School in Huntington, L.I.
Although she was exposed to opera while growing up, Ms. Carey said she was never drawn to it, preferring "freer music". Her influences included her mother's Billie Holiday records and her brother and sister's Al Green, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder albums. Above all, she has been drawn to the gospel of Aretha Franklin, the Clark Sisters, the Edwin Hawkins Singers and Shirley Caesar.
Ms. Carey said she had wanted to be a professional singer since she was 4 years old. She began working with musicians when she was 13, and at 16 she started writing songs with Ben Margulies, a young composer who collaborated with her on six of her album's 11 songs. Her big break came in November 1988 when Brenda K. Starr, a dance-pop vocalist with whom she had worked in clubs, took her to a party to celebrate the inauguration of WTG Records, a CBS-affiliated label run by Jerry Greenberg.
"Brenda walked up to Jerry, introduced me and said, 'This is my friend Mariah, she's 18 and writes her own music,' " Ms. Carey recalled. "Tommy Mottola was there, and when Brenda handed my tape to Jerry, Tommy grabbed it away from him. When Brenda told me who he was, I was really nervous. I just said hi and walked away. He went out to his car and put it on and listened to the first two songs and turned around and came back to find me, but I was gone. There was no phone number on the tape. That Monday, he contacted Brenda's manager, and Brenda called me to tell me he had heard it. The next day I went up to CBS with my mom, and we talked he said he wanted to give me a record deal and put me on Columbia." (The New York Times)
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