“I listen to hip-hop a lot, and have grown up with it, in a sense, as a listener,” says Mariah Carey, explaining the street beats that propel much of her new album, Daydream. That's part of the reason why, in addition to longtime collaborator Walter Afanasieff, she worked with the likes of Jermaine Dupri, David Morales, Babyface and Sean
“Puffy” Combs.
“I first decided to work with Jermaine when he did the Kris Kross record ‘Jump’ a few years ago,” she says. “People would not exactly listen to that and go, ‘Oh — Mariah Carey should work with this guy.’ You know? But I'm listening to it as, ‘This track is something that I could put a song over, and put my voice on top of, and make it into my own thing’.”
That's pretty much the way she and Dupri approached “Fantasy.” Before she began work on the backing track, Carey says. “I had the melody and the background vocal parts, and then I decided to put them together with the Tom Tom Club song. and work on top of that. ‘The Tom Tom Club’ was, to me, one of the best tracks ever made. It evokes this really happy feeling, and reminds me of growing up. Really good times. So we contacted [Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth], and they were into the idea, and we did it.
“Then, when I wanted to do the remix, I wanted to work with Puffy, because I think he really has a handle on what's going on with the street. And I wanted to have O.D.B do the rap. Puffy used the same sample from the song, but a part that was more about the bassline than the pop version. So in a way, that was worked around the vocal as well, but he focused in more on the track being spare.”
Other tracks were anything but spare, particularly when it came to the vocals. “I really enjoy doing background vocals by myself,” she says. “I love creating a wall of vocals from scratch. I love playing with the different textures. I'll do, like, four breathy tracks, and then some harder tracks, and then some tracks with a different kind of style, and then put them together to try and see how many people I can make it sound like. I just play. It's fun for me to experiment with my voice.”