Pop singer Mariah Carey is only 24 but has already racked up a long string of hit records. Her multi-octave voice is a fixture on Top 40, R & B and adult-contemporary radio. She's become “America's Sweetheart” to journalists who can't find a dent in her storybook career — and to millions of teenagers who relish her songs about fulfilling dreams through hard work and perseverance.
And in this true-life Cinderella story, success has not spoiled her.
Carey just released her first Christmas album, Merry Christmas, which jumped to No. 7 on this week's Billboard charts. She'll also mark the holiday season with a benefit show at New York's St. John the Divine Church this Thursday to raise $1 million for the Fresh Air Fund — a nonprofit agency that runs summer camps for impoverished city youths.
“It's something positive where you can really make a difference,” Carey says of the Fresh Air Fund, which just bestowed the name “Camp Mariah” to its career-awareness camp in Fishkill, N.Y., to honor the singer.
“This is not just something I'm doing now and will blow off in the future,” says Carey in a phone interview from Manhattan. She'll even join the fund's board of directors in January, but not before playing Thursday's benefit before such celebrities as Tony Bennett, Gloria Estefan, David Geffen and Julio Iglesias.
Carey, who grew up poor, was raised by her mother in the New York area. They moved 13 times during her childhood. She was a hat-check girl before her break came, so she knows about paying dues. Carey also recalls attending a summer camp at age 11 that was “a horrible dump that I'd like to forget.” Thus, getting involved with the new Camp Mariah is special to her.
“I should add that Kelly Price, one of my backup singers, was a Fresh Air child for seven years,” says Carey. “She went to one of these camps and said it really saved her life in a lot of ways. Who knows where she would have ended up without it?”
Carey has already made several visits to the children at the Fishkill camp, an hour north of Manhattan. “It's a great experience to see the kids' reactions to me because I think what I represent to them is hope. I say to them, ‘If I can do this, then you too can achieve your goals.’ I'm not like some magical genie that just appeared. I'm a singer. I'm a real person.
“Some of them really freak out, but as I become more real to them, they realize what's going on. I tell them, ‘I've always wanted to do this, and I really worked very hard. And if you believe in yourself, you can be anything that you want to be.’ I think it really inspires them. I have a mother who always said that to me, but a lot of these kids don't have someone who's encouraging them.”
Carey's actions are a logical extension of her hit song last year, “Hero,” which urged youths to develop self-reliance. “You don't have to be afraid of who you are,” she sang with diva-like assurance. The song followed earlier No. 1 hits “Vision of Love,” “Someday” and “Love Takes Time.”
Apart from her philanthropy, which is a welcome contrast to the behavior of some of her self-indulgent peers, Carey is becoming a much more confident singer. Her early albums were often polished to a fault, but she cuts loose with unbridled soul on the new Christmas disc. Oddly enough, it may be her best album. She blends original songs (such as “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which debuted in video form on MTV this week) with traditional carols (“Silent Night” and “Joy to the World”) and even Phil Spector's Yuletide classic, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”
“Why did I cut loose on this record? It was probably because of the whole gospel nature of it,” Carey says. “It was being able to have a different forum for my voice. The gospel songs were really inspiring. Even now, going back into the studio, to record new songs, it's really helped me. I went in and did a song the other day in two takes and didn't want to do anything more with it. Usually, I would fix of lot of things and try to make it perfect. But something happened to me since I did the [Christmas] record which made it a lot easier.
“It was like doing my Unplugged record,” she says of a disc released a few years ago. “That was a stepping stone for me. And this was very similar, in terms of it being a whole new experience, like opening a whole new door.”
She again worked with her longtime pianist, Walter Afanasieff, but also with organist Loris Holland, a gospel legend who had played with an idol of Carey's, Vanessa Bell Armstrong. They started recording last Christmas with “Silent Night.”
“This is the year that Christmas never ended for me,” says Carey, who has no plans to tour until later next year. “It's going to be weird when Christmas is over, because I'm actually going to have to take my decorations down. We've had the decorations up in the studio all year.”
