Many say it's the unimpeachable power of her high-coloratura vocals that assured Mariah Carey's success, but after hearing her heart-piercing Music Box album, some may hereafter maintain that it actually was the perceptible hurt in her voice.
“I always used to sing when I was a little girl if I was upset about something,” says Carey, sitting alone in mix room A of Sony Music Studios, on Manhattan's West Side, after listening for the first time to the final mastering of her much-anticipated third full-length album. “Some kids go outside and play basketball or something, but I would take a walk by myself in the woods, or wherever nobody else was, and I'd sing to myself.”
The enduringly reflective pangs in her singing are perhaps the most absorbing aspect of Carey's four-octave abilities. Whether it's “Vision Of Love,” from her 1990 self-titled debut, “Make It Happen” from 1991's Emotions collection, the savvy exuberance of 1992's MTV Unplugged EP, or the current “Dreamlover” single, Mariah's earnest interior monologues convey the doctrine that belief is its own dominion/sanctuary.
As a consecration of this view, Music Box is easily the most elemental of Carey's releases, her vocal eurythmics in natural sync with songs that examine the personal ferment of faith, particularly fidelity to one's most private emotional ideals. Unlike her previous studio efforts, technical perfection has been downplayed in favor of feel and flow — a move aligned with her decision to tour this fall. “I'm just more comfortable about being myself and letting go,” she says.
Music Box treats trust as a secular sacrament. Yet the album confronts an era when constancy and its sensual value have been despoiled by meanness of spirit, any hint of devotional candor automatically decried as déclassé. One must venture back to the best Motown work of Tammi Terrell to find singing so instinctive in its exaltation of vulnerability as (arduous) virtue.
Nonethless, the material is marbled with admissions of “disillusion,” “loneliness and emptiness,” and the dread that “everything fades away.” To understand why somebody would put such feelings on the public record (Carey is the lyricist and co-composer of almost all the songs), one must consider the background of the singer herself.
The youngest of three children by aeronautical engineer Alfred Carey and the former Patricia Hickey, a vocal coach and one time mezzo-soprano with the New York City Opera, Mariah was born on March 27, 1970. It was the iffy onset of an uneasy decade, as fighting raged in the Middle East, Simon & Garfunkel's “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was the most popular song in America, and four students at Kent State Univ. were a week away from being slain by National Guardsmen during an anti-war demonstration.
Unbeknownst to the infant Mariah, the Carey household hadits own troubles, her family soon to rupture into two separate camps, Mariah fated to be reared as if an only child.
“My parents divorced when I was 3,” she says, “and after the divorce my older sister lived with my dad. My brother moved out when he was 16 and I was 6, so I grew up on my own with my mom. I was always singing around the house because she was always singing, so I would try to mimic her.” A subtle grin. “She couldn't shut me up. I was like a little tape recorder.”
Patricia Carey was the impressionable Mariah's inevitable exemplar, but the economically pressed parent preferred to regard her daughter as a cohort and comrade-in-arms. “She wouldn't let anybody talk baby-talk around me,” Mariah says. “She had me around all her friends as a kid, and she used to say I was like a little adult. All I wanted to do was sing for my mom's friends, so I would memorize every jingle on TV, and whatever records were playing around the house, like Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin.”
Those soulsongs, commercial ditties, and the mother who lovingly praised Mariah's execution of each, were the only touchpoints in Carey's unsettled existence. Mrs. Carey and her daughter moved some 13 times (“I always felt the rug could be pulled out from under me”) before Mariah reached her teens. Mariah's mounting sense of detachment from her ever-shifting surroundings was reinforced by the schoolmates who criticized the striking looks afforded by her interracial heritage.
“My father is Venezuelan and black, and my mother's Irish — her parents came from County Cork,” Carey explains, “so I guess I was seen as being different. I felt like an ugly duckling, but if I didn't think I belonged, I at least knew I had a special thing: I could sing.”
It excited Mariah to discover that her maternal grandfather also had been a singer and musician. Unfortunately, Patricia Carey could share only sketchy details. “He died a month before she was born,” Mariah says, “so she didn't know him.”
Religion was another link to her ancestry, but Patricia Carey was a fallen Catholic of conviction, so all issues of belief centered on self-reliance. An instance of personal pluck that still produces giggles for Mariah was her appearance, while still a first grader, in a high-school production of South Pacific, during which she sang “Honey Bun.” Subsequent attempts to open up to adults other than her mother usually met with disappointment. “In my third-grade class at an elementary school in Northport, we got assignments to write poetry,” she recalls. “My teacher, a Mr. Cohen, wouldn't believe I wrote them, and embarrassed me in class, telling me I copied them out of a book!
“People try to drag you down and shatter your dreams a lot of times,” she shrugs, more bewildered than embittered, “maybe because their own dreams haven't been fulfilled. It was funny how no teacher ever supported my singing; they would always tell me, ‘What's gonna make you different?’ That's why I wrote ‘Make It Happen’ on my second album. I was trying to inspire the people that nobody encourages.”
At age 14, Carey began a secret after-school life as a demo singer for several Long Island studios, and six of the songs (including “Vision Of Love”) she penned at 16 with early collaborator Ben Margulies wound up on her debut album. But the period before she signed with Columbia was a lean one, Mariah leaving home shortly after her mother's second marriage, supporting herself at 17 with assorted gigs (“I hat-checked, sold t-shirts, waitressed in the Sports Bar and at the Boathouse Cafe in Central Park”) and back-up vocal stints for supporters like Brenda K. Starr. “I walked and worked and waitressed in a pair of shoes with holes in them in the snow and slush,” she laughs, “living on one plate of pasta a day between three people.”
The ultimate lessons of the distance traveled are preserved in “Hero,” a moving highlight of the refreshingly open Music Box.
“The song is saying you don't need someone to say, ‘It's okay for you to do this,’ ” Carey says softly as she rises to go. “If you look inside yourself, and you believe, you can be your own hero.”