Despite a recent marriage split, Mariah Carey is pretty relaxed these days. In fact, so relaxed that she likes to do her interviews in bed. “Whenever I get a chance I like to rest.” she says, as she tosses off her high-heeled black shoes and slips under the covers of the giant double bed that takes centre stage in her Los Angeles hotel suite.
She's wearing little more than a short black slip dress. “It's Dolce & Gabbana,” she's quick to punctuate.
Oblivious to the fact she's hours late tor the interview. Carey laughs at one of the many rumours that have dogged her seven-year career. “They think I'm some unapproachable diva that has 50 million bodyguards. But as you can see, that's not me,” she says, punching the pillows to get comfortable.
She also laughs at the many tabloid reports since the break-up of her marriage to Sony chief Tommy Mottola. She's been romantically linked with everyone from Donald Trump to basketball and rap stars. “It's just funny for me, because I've never been out there in that way,” she says. “Now it's like a free for all and they're making me look like a promiscuous freak.”
With the release of her new album, Butterfly, the singer, who has rarely performed live, is about to embark on her first world tour, which starts in the US in October and is scheduled to bring her to Australia early next year.
Butterfly seems an appropriate title for an artist undergoing her own metamorphosis with an obvious move away from her trademark glass-breaking shrieks. Carey has collaborated with the cream of hip-hop producers like Puff Daddy and Bone Thugs and Harmony, in an attempt to deliver an album for her pop audience but also to win some hard-core street cred.
She may be the largest-selling female artist of the 90s, selling more than 80 million albums, but she's rarely been a critics' favourite with her music often labelled as “NutraSweet soul”. Her marriage to Mottola, 19 years her senior, earned her the dubious moniker of “Queen of Sony”, and reports of preferential treatment often overshadowed Carey's considerable vocal abilities that span a five-octave range.
Amid rumours that the svengali and his protege were worlds apart, not only in age but in lifestyle — the 28-year-old Mariah preferring all-night vigils at dance clubs with her black rap friends, Mottola preferring sedate dinners at their $13 million upstate New York mansion — the two announced their separation last June just shy of their fourth wedding anniversary.
Carey scoffs at suggestions the break-up will affect her career. “Sure, it's been difficult, but the thing is we have a really good relationship regardless. He's a brilliant man and I totally respect him. We have a strong friendship and great working relationship.”
In fact, Carey considers a reconciliation still possible. While she's shopping for her own Manhattan apartment, she's always welcome at the couple's lavish 24ha estate, and Mottola, whom Carey describes as “an incredible cook”, still offers to cook up her favourite pasta sauce. “You never know what may happen in the future,” she says softly. “I don't believe in closing doors. Let's say I'm still hopeful we'll be able to work it out.”
Carey was a mere teenager when, at a party, she met Mottola — considered the most powerful man in the music business. She handed him a demo tape and Carey the waitress and sometime back-up singer was transformed from a life of near poverty — sharing a one-bedroom flat with two other girls, splitting one dish of pasta between them as their daily meal — to unbelievable riches and fame. But insiders have speculated that it was Mottola's controlling ways that contributed to the break-up.
Carey says the details of the couple's split are “completely personal” and denies the video to her new single Honey, featuring the singer as a prisoner in a mansion before making a bid for freedom, is seemingly symbolic.
“I got the idea when I was jet skiing in Puerto Rico,” she says defiantly. “It has nothing to do with Tommy. It's inspired by James Bond movies.”
In the video Carey pays admirable homage to the Bond girls spending most of the video in skimpy swimsuits. While the lithe 173cm singer admits her fitness routine usually consists of nothing more than a few sit-ups before bedtime, she did work out for an hour a day before the shoot.
Born into an interracial marriage — her mother was Irish American and her father black Venezuelan — Carey says she was lucky to escape hardships that afflicted her older siblings.
“My parents divorced when I was very young, but my older sister and brother endured some harsh fascism,” she says. Her HIV-positive sister has led a life of drugs and prostitution and her brother was recently arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.
So while her move to a more black urban sound on Butterfly may seem deliberate for Carey, it's also a journey back to her cultural heritage. “This is really the direction I've always wanted to head in. This is what I really love.”
