Mariah Carey Just Revealed She Made A Secret Grunge Album In The ’90s, And It’s Pretty Good
"[It was] just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days."
Ahead of the release of her memoir later this week, Mariah Carey has shared an excerpt revealing she worked and appears uncredited on a little-known alternative grunge album from the mid-’90s, doing so “just for laughs”.
On Twitter, Carey shared an excerpt from her pending memoir The Meaning Of Mariah Carey which revealed her work on Chick’s sole album Someone’s Ugly Daughter, released in 1995.
In it, she reveals she wrote and recorded it as a joke while she worked on Daydreams, but soon “started to love” it and that it helped ‘get her through some dark days’.
“I’d bring my little alt-rock song to the band and hum a silly guitar riff,” she writes. “They would pick it up and we would record it immediately. It was irreverent, raw, and urgent, and the band got into it. I actually started to love some of the songs.”
Carey shared a snippet of Chick track ‘Hermit’ in the Tweet, where she provides a “hidden layer” of vocals underneath Chick’s lead Clarissa Dane, who was Carey’s roommate at the time of recording.
Fun fact: I did an alternative album while I was making Daydream 👀 Just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days. Here's a little of what I wrote about it in #TheMeaningOfMariahCarey 🤟 S/O to my friend Clarissa who performs the lead w/ me as a hidden layer #Chick #TMOMC pic.twitter.com/Re23t5whcd
— Mariah Carey (@MariahCarey) September 27, 2020
In the excerpt, Carey says she found the grunge ‘character’ super freeing.
“I would fully commit to my character. I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time,” she writes. “You know the ones who seemed to be so carefree with their feelings and their image. They could be angry, angsty, and messy, with old shoes, wrinkled slips, and unruly eyebrows, while every move I made was so calculated and manicured.”
“I wanted to break free, let loose, and express my misery — but I also wanted to laugh. I totally looked forward to doing my alter-ego band sessions after Daydream each night.”
Carey isn’t credited on the album’s liner notes, though there are a few clues connecting her. Jay Healy and Dana Jon Chappelle are listed as the album’s engineers — Chappelle was Carey’s chief engineer for 14 years, and Healy worked across multiple Carey albums, too. Reviews for the album on Amazon also say there’s a “hidden element” on the album.
In a statement to Pitchfork, Carey’s representatives state that the elusive chanteuse wrote, produced and provided backing vocals on every song on the album (albeit she didn’t write ‘Surrender’, a Cheap Trick cover). She also created the album artwork’s direction and directed one music video.
Unfortunately, the album isn’t available on streaming services, though a handful of songs float around on YouTube. Physical copies are available on Amazon, but as of writing have been price-hiked to $970.
Find three Chick tracks below, as well as an album sampler.