It wasn't exactly the tip-off to her career, but it was certainly a prophetic event for Mariah Carey.
Through some contacts made by Columbia Records' Bobby Colomby, Carey had been tapped to sing “America The Beautiful” before the first game of the NBA championship series at the Palace of Auburn Hills, in the northern suburbs of Detroit. Besides a capacity crowd — which gave her rendition a warm ovation — Carey's performance was seen nationwide via CBS Sports' broadcast of the game.
“It was a great break for me,” Carey remembers. “I heard there were some people going into record stores asking for the girl who sang at the game.” She pauses and adds with a laugh, “I heard one guy picked up the record, started looking at the songs and said ‘I'm not buying this. It doesn't have ‘America The Beautiful’!”
The Detroit Pistons, of course, went on to win the NBA championship. And Carey has become the latest champion of the pop charts.
Her eponymous debut album is a multi-platinum seller, and it's spawned two No. 1 singles, “Vision Of Love” and “Love Takes Time”; the former, in fact, marked the first time in five years that two songs simultaneously topped Billboard's pop, r&b and adult-contemporary charts. Carey also earned overwhelming critical praise — “She appropriates gospel and blues idioms as if they had her name on them,” wrote Musician magazine — and while she has still to mount a concert tour, she's been an in-demand TV guest, wowing audiences on Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show.
“If Mariah Carey had never been born,” wrote the Associated Press, “some record company executive would have surely invented her.” Indeed, her success has frequently been compared to Whitney Houston's, which stemmed not only from talent but from the strong hand of Arista Records president Clive Davis, who's been the executive producer of Houston's three albums. Carey's debut no doubt benefited from the strong attention of CBS Records Group president Tommy Mottola — as well as from producers Narada Michael Walden, Rhett Lawrence, Ben Margulies and Ric Wake — but Carey goes to great lengths to distinguish herself as anything but an invented talent.
“Since this was my first album, I took a certain amount of direction from the record company,” says Carey, who co-wrote the album's 10 songs. “They are taking a certain chance on you, so I accepted the different producers and all of that. But I'd like to be involved in everything before too long.
“You see, this has been my one goal. I've always known I wanted to sing, since I was four years old, at least. I've never, ever swayed from that. This is my life.”
Carey was, in fact, born into music. She was raised in New York state by her mother, Patricia Carey, a former New York City Opera singer and vocal coach who divorced Carey's father when Mariah was three. Growing up, Carey was accustomed to having her mother's friends, colleagues and students at the house, jamming late into the night with the host's little girl joining right in.
“I sort of studied with (my mother) from the age of four on, and that was like a training that always stayed with me,” she says. “She taught me all the basics — how to not harm your voice, how to breathe correctly, how to warm up. That helped me later on, when I was doing my own music.
“And having all those people around gave me a chance to hear different styles and different techniques. To me, that was part of being a child.” She pauses, and laughs. “I thought everybody had musicians at their house all the time.”
Being exposed to that wealth of talent, however, made Carey curiously aloof when she was approached to sing in bands with her friends. “It was anticlimactic to go singing with a high school band after having all those great people around me,” she says.
Instead, Carey polished her skills as a singer and a writer. Her older sister and brother played r&b music for her, and she quickly developed a taste for gospel, which she calls “the most genuine, soulful music you can imagine.” She had eschewed much formal training, but the voice she developed was startlingly rich and elastic, with tremendous range (seven octaves) and emotion.
“When you're singing classical, you have to go through years of school, and it's much more rigid,” she explains. “What I do isn't as structured, especially since I'm writing my own songs and creating what I'm singing. I'm creating the melody. That's much freer.”
Writing, says Carey — who co-wrote with her producers on the album — has become a natural process for her. “I don't really think about it,” she says. “I write whatever comes out of me, a melody or whatever. I'm not going to write something I don't like.
“It's all very unplanned. With Ben (Margulies), who I do most of my writing with, we're the same type of musicians — kind of uneducated musicians as far as theory. It's an off-the-cuff kind of musicianship. We'll come up with an idea, jam for however long, then I'll take it home and write the lyrics. We do what we like to hear and what I like to sing.”
Those judgments, however, didn't exactly coincide with how the music industry initially felt about Carey's songs. Moving to Manhattan after high school, she settled not into a recording studio but into a waitress job where, during after-hours cleaning up, she'd watch videos on MTV and let her resentment build. She told Musician magazine. “I'd be sitting there watching some video — Debbie Gibson or something — and I'd be fuming furiously. Like, ‘Why do I have to sit here and waitress while these people are doing videos.’ I was sooo pissed.”
The situation righted itself in short order, however. The demos she and Margulies sprinkled around the city drew attention, and before long she was doing session work. Brenda K. Starr even took her on the road, and it was Starr who passed Carey's tape to CBS Records' Mottola. Now it's an understatement when Carey notes that “everything worked out.”
Success, however, breeds expectations, but while preparing songs for her second album and continuing to promote her debut, Carey is trying to ignore those pressures. “I can't really think about it,” she says. “I have to think about what I'm doing and my singing and my songwriting and do the best I can. Hopefully, if people enjoy my music, that'll make me feel good and I'll know I'm doing all right… I've always felt that you can do whatever you want to do if you believe in yourself, and that's what's happening for me now. And I'm glad it's all happening before it's too late.”