Because of her separation in May from her husband of four years, record company chief Tommy Mottola, Mariah Carey's 1997 was always going to be seen first and foremost as the Year of the Split. But that does not mean the biggest-selling female artist of the 1990s has been idle on the work front.
Since a million self-satisfied I-told-you-sos were triggered by the separation. Carey has made another momentous decision, replacing the manager who had accompanied every step of her unstoppable ascent. She has also completed what she considers to be the most personal of her five studio albums, Butterfly, which wafted into British record stores yesterday.
Already it is dear that for all the personal trauma, Carey still has Midas on the payroll: this week, the album's first single, “Honey,” went straight to No 1 in the American charts, taking her ahead of Whitney Houston and Madonna as the female artist with the most chart-topping singles ever. Carey is still on fire, or, as Billboard magazine was moved to put it, paraphrasing the Notorious B.I.G., “Mo' Honey. No Problems”.
For my audience with Carey, I was summoned to a room in her London hotel — not her own chambers, it soon became clear, but a boudoir loaned by a member of Team Carey — and was introduced to the chanteuse reclining 'neath the sheets in a skimpy two-piece number. I shock the hand of pop royalty, pondering whether the same faux-intimate location would have been chosen had the interviewer been Mrs Merton.
She is attracted to such settings, it seems, by the fatigue induced by an obsessively hands-on approach to her career. Butterfly was completed hazardously close to deadline, and Carey takes responsibility for that. By her admission, she is not at home to the word “delegation”.
“I can't put my record in anybody else's hands because nobody else really cares as much as I do about it,” she says. “Other producers are always moving on to the next project. That's why I co-produce everything that I do, because I don't really trust anybody's opinion or devotion to it as much as my own.”
Such an attitude can either be seen as laudably realistic or something of a brush-off for the producers who helped her to prepare Butterfly for take-off, including longtime sideman Walter Afanasieff and urban music's man of the moment Sean “Puffy” Combs. Either way, the album is more soulful than any of its platinum-plated predecessors and lyrically, says Carey, it is closer to her true, vulnerable self.
“There are some lyrics that are completely personal. I put it on and it calms me, I go to sleep with the album. I've never done that before. The other day I woke up to one of the songs and I almost can't believe I put it out — it's so personal.
“People are going to be so analytical about a lot of it because of what's been going on in my personal life, but even beyond that, it almost feels like I'm letting go of a part of me.”
She speaks affectionately of “Close my Eyes,” a reflective piece that unlike many of her other ballads, does not come choked with cabaret sentimentality. In the song she describes herself as a woman-child who “was on the verge of fading/Thankfully I woke up in time.”
“That's not a reference to my marriage,” she says swiftly. “I've had to be a grown-up since I was six years old. My mother worked two jobs, my brother was supposed to stay home and watch me and he was out doing his thing.”
Her Venezuelan father and Irish-American, opera-singing mother divorced when Carey was a toddler. “I don't feel it's really appropriate to go into the dark craziness that went on in parts of my life,” she says now. “Thank God I had, and have, a mother who encouraged and inspired me, and is one of the main reasons I'm here today.
“In the song I guess I was thinking about how far I'd come, but how I was in so many ways that same little girl always struggling to feel OK about myself.”
Aware that every lyric, every last comment will be dissected for clues about her relationship with Mottola (whom she thanks in the album's liner notes “for being here in every way”). Carey says she has already had to field some laughable misinterpretations.
“They said my video for “Honey” is my revenge on Tommy because I have an actor in it that people say reminds them of him. They said: ‘She's a princess trapped in a mansion, and she jumps our of the window and goes in the pool and changes clothes.’
“But it was a Bond movie spoof, I'm a secret agent, not a princess. It's tongue-in-cheek, but everybody made out like it was my big shot at him. I just wanted to show my personality because I don't think the public has ever seen it. I don't think people even know I can complete a sentence.”
She has resumed acting studies, and the first draft of a movie has just arrived. But whether on the silver screen or through freshly introspective lyrics, she is determined to become known as herself.
“When you're in the middle of a huge corporate machine people can tend to be very cautious if you allow them to be. It's not that anybody had anything but my best interests at heart, but it's not as fulfilling to be someone that people don't know.
“People are going to judge you regardless, so I'd rather people judge me on the basis of who I am rather than an image that's half of who I am.”
