Four years ago, after her first NBC concert special, Mariah Carey retreated to her upstate New York home and tried to put her career into focus.
It had been a dizzying career that saw her first five singles rocket to No. 1, helping to turn the former waitress and hat-check girl into a diva cited in the same breath as Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, and even Barbra Streisand.
“I was staring at the moon and thinking, ‘Wow, I've really come a long way, but have I reflected on it?’ ” says Carey, now 27. “Because at that point, I had accomplished so much so quickly… and I was sitting there just thinking about the little girl that dreamt about doing what I had just done, and realizing there was so much of the same person inside of me.”
Carey unleashes more of that person — a woman/child with a multiracial past who moved 13 times with her divorced mother — on a revealing new album, Butterfly. It came out Tuesday and illustrates a deeper side of Carey, known often as a videogenic pop princess who hides a lot from her public.
“I'm letting more of myself come through in the music. I'm allowing more truth to be there. I think I've let my guard down in a lot of ways,” says Carey, who is recently separated from husband Tommy Mottola (president of Sony Records) and is “growing as an independent woman” more each day.
While Carey stared at that moon four years ago, she jotted down lyrics to “Close My Eyes,” which was finally finished for the new album. She had released two albums in the interim (1994's Music Box and 1995's 7 million-selling Daydream) but waited to complete the song until she had more confidence in sharing personal insights.
As the song says: “I was a wayward child with the weight of the world that I held deep inside/ Life was a winding road and I learned many things little ones shouldn't know… maybe I grew up too soon… funny how one can learn to grow numb to the madness and block it away.”
“What I did as a child,” says Carey, who grew up in Manhattan and Long Island, “was block everything out and say, ‘I'm going be a singer, I'm going to be OK, I'm going to get out of this.’ So that's what got me through. Music has always been my savior. And over the last few years, just dealing with this whole bizarre thing of being in the public eye added a whole new dimension.”
Musically and philosophically, she comes of age on the new disc. It teams her with hot street producers Sean “Puffy” Combs and David Morales, as well as longtime collaborator Walter Afanasieff. It features a more deeply erotic passion in her vocals, which carried over to the video for the single “Honey.”
Amid the album's blend of adult-contemporary hip-hop and sweepingly romantic pop ballads, Carey also features a song with rap icons Bone Thugs n' Harmony. It's called “Breakdown” and is believed to refer to her breakup with Mottola, though that's not the case, she says.
“People are looking at that song as the most overtly personal song and applying it to my situation, but really, that song was all about the rhythmic and melodic flow that I was inspired by,” says Carey. “And that's really Bone Thugs n' Harmony — the way that they rhyme and sing. I wanted to do a song in their style, so that when they came into the studio to hear it, they would know immediately that I had been totally influenced by them.
“People shouldn't be misled by the song. No, it's not my theme song,” says Carey.
She admits to breaking down occasionally because her private life is so dissected by tabloid media, but, regarding Mottola, she bears no animosity. “I just left his office five minutes ago and we had a great conversation,” she says. “We'll always be friends regardless of what we go through or whatever happens. I respect him enormously. He's an incredible businessman. And whatever we went through is just really personal to us.
“Right now, I feel like I'm in a really good place. And the reason I named the album Butterfly is because I feel strongly about that song as a writer, but also because it's a very hopeful song — a song of strength, about being strong enough to recognize when a situation is not right and having the power within yourself to let that go.”
The album has many songs of strength. And there are several transforming songs of love. “The Roof” is about making love in the rain on a city rooftop, and “Fourth of July” is an empowering love ballad. There also are such therapeutic tunes as a remake of Prince's “The Beautiful Ones” (“the beautiful ones, they hurt you every time”) and the climactic “Outside.” It's a meditation on her multiracial roots — an Irish mother and black Venezuelan father — with the pensive verse: “Blind and unguided into a world divided you're thrown, where you're never quite the same… You'll always be somewhere on the outside.”
The honesty depicted in Carey's new disc, for which she co-wrote everything except the Prince track, was helped by acting classes she took in New York the past year. “Acting has helped to access my emotions that much better, and to relive experiences from the past,” says Carey, “because I did go through life blocking a lot of things to get through difficult situations.” (A movie project is now being written for her, but she won't discuss it before it's confirmed.)
Carey is freer these days — and the listener is the better for it. She doesn't oversing, as she's been prone to do with her spectacular, multioctave voice. Nor does she shirk from belting when the need arises.
“I let out a lot of emotion during the making of the album and that's why I feel so close to it,” says Carey. “It's been like therapy.”
