You're 21. You've just sold 7 million copies of your first album. You've had four straight No. 1 hits. You've won two Grammy awards, three “Soul Train” awards. Your second album entered the Billboard charts at No. 4.
Your name is Mariah Carey and you're living a strange but wonderful dream. What's it like?
“I'm still the same person I was before this whole thing started, so that's normal,” Carey says. “But I don't know how normal it is to go through what I'm going through. I don't know if I can say it's a normal life.
“It gets a little weird emotionally. Because there's no one I grew up with — and no one in my family — who can really relate to what I'm going through. It's hard for anybody to understand how it feels. But it's great. I've wanted it all my life.”
Carey, whose idols are Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder, came out of nowhere with her debut disc, Mariah Carey, a slickly soulful pop/R&B set with those four No. 1 hits, “Vision of Love,” “Love Takes Time,” “Someday” and “I Don't Wanna Cry.”
Her new album, Emotions, is a better, more honest and raw showcase of her octave-leaping voice. The songs she wrote, including one written with Carole King, convey more maturity and a depth that reveals influences from Stevie Wonder to gospel singer Shirley Caesar.
“I was like 16 years old when I wrote some of the songs on the first album,” says Carey during a phone interview from New York. “So I have a different outlook on things now. I've broadened my horizons. And I've gotten much more into gospel music.”
While most of Carey's songs are either snappy dance tracks or virtuoso, hair-raising love songs, the new disc reveals more autobiography in the willful “Make It Happen.” It's about living on the edge, not having enough money to buy new shoes, but still clinging to your dreams.
“I never really had money growing up,” says Carey, the youngest of three children, in a phone interview from New York. “I wasn't poverty-stricken, but my parents got divorced when I was 3, and we had the least amount of money everywhere we went. I lived with my mother and we moved like 13 times, from Brooklyn Heights out to a bunch of towns on Long Island.”
Carey's mother, Patricia, is a former singer with the New York City Opera. She taught her daughter to sing at age 4 — and Mariah can't remember wanting to do anything else. “I remember always wanting to be next to the radio and singing. I had to be dragged away from the radio to be put to sleep. And whenever I was down, I would sing to feel better. It seems I've always known this is what I wanted to do. There was like no choice.”
Her learning process was soon in full swing. “My brother and sister, who are nine and 10 years older than me, would listen to Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight and Al Green. I began to love that music. And when they grew up and moved out, I kept their records and continued to listen even when that wasn't the new music for kids my age, when I was 10 or 11.”
When Carey moved to Manhattan after graduating from high school at 17, her musical dream entered another phase. “I would work in restaurants, then work on demo tapes until 4 or 5 in the morning,” she says.
“Then I got a job singing backgrounds for a girl named Brenda Kay Starr. She became a good friend and she's the one who helped me get my break by bringing me to a CBS party and handing my tape to the people there. Then all of a sudden, Warner Bros. wanted to sign me too. I had two huge labels wanting to sign me after I couldn't get arrested the week before.”
Collaborators on the new album include David Cole and Robert Clivilles of C&C Music Factory on four dance tracks; and Walter Afanasieff on six soul and gospel ballads. The lyrics are almost all Carey's — and suggest a wisdom far beyond her 21 years.
The most impressive new song, and certainly the most mature, is “The Wind,” written first as a jazz instrumental by West Coast pianist Russ Freeman in the '50s. Carey adds lyrics addressed to a loved one who has died. “The song is a reflection on a lot of the young people who are dying of different things today,” she says. “There's a lot of messed-up things happening in the world — AIDS and everything else. Actually, I never knew someone my age who died until a friend that I grew up with was recently killed in a drunk-driving accident,” she says. “So I was kind of inspired by that, because it was the first time it was really real to me.”
