Hard work still pays off. Just ask Mariah Carey, the 23-year-old singer whose meteoric rise has been labeled a fluke, but is really due to years of preparation. While Carey was a teen-ager, her friends would spend their free time partying, but Carey would typically retreat to a recording studio, working far into the night and often until dawn.
“Just because you're young, no one should immediately assume that you haven't paid your dues,” says Carey, whose third studio album, Music Box, comes out today. It's another richly soulful set of love songs cut with gospel inflections and inspiring lyrics about conquering adversity.
“I used to do jobs like waitressing, coat-checking, selling T-shirts — I did all of those things,” the New York-based Carey says in a phone interview from London. “I'd work until 1 in the morning, then go to the studio and sometimes stay until 9 a.m. My friends would say, ‘You work too hard. What are you doing?’
“And I'd say, ‘I want to make something of myself, so I have to work hard.’ Everybody was freaked out, because I was this young kid doing all this hard work. I got by on very little sleep and I still do, because I got myself on that crazy schedule. I still can't sleep until it's really late, though I'm not as bad as I used to he. I'm usually in bed by 3:30 or 4 in the morning now.”
Carey, whose first five singles went to No. 1 two years ago (including “Vision of Love,” “Someday” and “Love Takes Time”) started working in late-night studios when she was between only 12 and 13 years old. She grew up in Manhattan and Long Island, the daughter of a former mezzo-soprano for the New York City Opera who essentially brought her up alone, after a divorce. Carey grew up with little money and, though she received emotional support from her mother, she received none from her teachers, she says.
“When I was in school, none of my teachers were supportive of me or my singing. They'd be like, ‘Oh, what's really going to make you different?’ It was insulting. Why do you do that to someone? You shouldn't shatter somebody's dream.”
Carey, as a result, wrote a song, “Hero,” which is on the new album and affirms self-reliance. “There's a hero if you look inside your heart/ You don't have to be afraid of who you are,” she sings in her full-throated, diva-like style. As she notes from London: “I wrote the song for a lot of kids who don't have someone who's supportive of them. All they have is someone who's trying to knock their dreams down.”
Carey, the daughter of a Venezuelan father and a mother from Ireland, grew up shy and alienated, partly because her mixed ancestry was derided at school and partly because her mother moved 13 times during Carey's chaotic youth. That's why Carey preferred the sheltered, late-night studio path (making a demo tape that finally caught the ear of Sony executives) instead of first trying to make a name in the clubs.
“I should have been doing clubs when I was coming up, but I was really afraid, because you hear so many horror stories and you see these horror stories yourself,” she notes. “You'll go into a club and there will be an unknown singer or band playing and no one pays attention. Nobody really cares. And it's so hard. I think it would have been too hard for me. I don't know if I would have been able to continue doing what I was doing if I had that kind of rejection.”
Instead, Carey only started doing live shows after she was an overnight sensation in 1990 with her first album. “I had to learn about performing by doing Arsenio Hall and The Tonight Show, which was very frightening,” she recalls. “I don't think many people learn about performing by going in front of millions of people like that.”
Her stage skills, though, picked up considerably when she performed on MTV's Unplugged last year. A subsequent live album from the show became another hit and included her smash version of the Jackson Five's “I'll Be There.” And now it's on to a full-tilt tour — her first — starting in late October. She plans to play large venues such as the Worcester Centrum.
“I feel a lot more comfortable onstage,” Carey says. “Doing Unplugged really helped me get more confident. I've learned that I don't have to be anything but who I am. And the people who are my fans, that's all they want from me. Anybody else who's not into me, they're never going to really be into me. I can't focus on them. I have to focus on giving something back to the people who have supported me since the beginning.”
Carey also has an NBC-TV concert coming out this fall, taken from a recent, low-profile show in Schenectady, N.Y. “We did it in this beautiful old theater. For the first eight rows, we gave away tickets to my fan club. I had people coming up to me saying they had driven all the way from Colorado. It's mind-boggling when somebody tells you they traveled that far to see you.”
Carey has also had a busy year personally. She caused a stir by marrying Sony Records president Tommy Mottola, who's nearly twice her age. The two enjoyed a lavish, celebrity-studded wedding that became headline news. Again, some observers thought Carey was just lucky.
“Sometimes people don't look at you like you're a person when you're in the public eye,” says Carey, sounding slightly world-weary. “They don't think that your feelings can be hurt. But when people say I haven't paid my dues or whatever, they don't know a thing about my life or about me. Just because I'm young and everything has happened so quickly is no reason to assume I've just been lucky. I've condensed so much hard work into a short period of time. My whole life hasn't been this incredible fairy tale. Yes, I'm very thankful, but I've worked for it.”
