Het 7-Octave Voice Finally Gets Noticed

Associated Press. August 1990. Text by Hillel Italie.

If Mariah Carey had never been born, some record company executive would have surely invented her.

She has a seven-octave voice and looks and ambition well beyond the whisper range. She also can write and arrange songs. The only question is why she had to wait until age 20 to hit it big.

“For a year I couldn't pay someone to listen to my tape,” explained Carey, whose debut single, the 1950s-styled ballad “Vision of Love,” quickly topped the charts.

“They think if you don't have a high-powered manager or don't have a record company that's already interested in you, you're no good. I had no connections and I was running with my writing partner (Ben Margulies), who was also new and didn't have any connections, either,” she said.

After working in bars and restaurants around New York, Carey was signed by Columbia Records. She had been singing backup for Brenda Kay Starr, a Columbia artist, and managed to get herself into a party attended by company president Tommy Mottola.

“Someone grabbed him and told him to listen to the tape,” Carey recalled. “He got out in his car, played it, and turned around and came back to find me. Everything worked out.”

Dog owners beware, Carey's range is so powerful that the two highest octaves are unintelligible to human ears. This is a voice that can probably shatter glass and then put it back together, that sounds as if she's taking the words and twirling them over her head like a cowboy with a lasso.

“I was using my upper register on ‘All in Your Mind,’ ” she said of one song from her self-titled album. “What happened was at the end of it, I did these vocal flips. When I was doing it, my voice split and went into a harmony. If you hear it, it splits. I was saying, ‘Get rid of that,’ but everyone said, ‘No way, we're keeping that.’ ”

“Mariah Carey” includes 11 songs, most of them co-written by Carey and Margulies. But if her life seems like a Cinderella story, you'll have to listen hard for any Prince Charming here.

“I Don't Wanna Cry,” “All in Your Mind,” “Alone in Love” and “You Need Me” are all about breaking up.

“So when the morning comes, you know I'll be gone,” she sings in “Prisoner.” In “Vanishing” and “Love Takes Time,” it's already over.

“A lot of those songs were written when I was kind of struggling, before I had a record deal,” she said. “It was a harrowing emotional time in my life. I was doing odd jobs and going towards this goal. They weren't necessarily all about relationships, but they were about things happening in my life.”

Narada Michael Walden, whose credits include Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston, produces along with Rhett Lawrence and Ric Wake. Carey, who'd just as soon look after herself, decided to accept the outside help — for now.

“They did put me with different producers that they wanted to have me work with, and this being the first album, I took a certain amount of direction from the record company,” she said. “You know, they are taking a chance. Ideally, though, I'd like to be involved with everything.”

Carey, born and raised in New York, is the daughter of Patricia Carey, a former singer with the New York City Opera and a vocal coach. Her parents divorced when she was young.

Childhood was a waiting game for Mariah, a gospel fan who knew she wanted to sing for a living at a time her classmates were dreaming of being doctors or astronauts.

“I'd hang out with my friends and go to parties and just be stupid and goof off, but when I was at home, I was listening to music and writing songs,” she said. “I would go and work with Ben or whoever I was working with. I wasn't like an outcast being a musician. I was like everyone else, but really I wasn't.”

You can find aspiring singers or actors in just about any New York restaurant, but Carey pushed for it just a little bit harder. While her fellow employees were out partying after work Carey was writing songs.

Maybe she didn't make a lot of close friends that way, she admits, but there was business to take care of, sweet destiny to achieve. How long can you sit tight when seven octaves are just bursting to get outside?

“I was doing all that because I wanted to get a record deal and make an album,” she said. “I can hang out and do things that aren't productive or I can make an album.

“Now, I like to take time out to go to a beach whenever I can, spend time with my friends and family. I just wanted it all to happen before it was too late.”