Mariah Carey is having a Case of the Mondays.
It's the day after Easter, and she's nursing a kick to the face from
her nearly 3-year-old son Moroccan after a long day of egg hunting. "We
were sort of winding down the day, removing his shoes, and he was having
his own moment of not wanting the night to end and he ended up getting
me square in the nose while the shoe was still on," says Carey, 44, on
the phone from her apart- ment in New York. Though her nose has a "tiny
bump" that Carey has been treating with ice and milk, the incident has
still apparently swollen her face enough that she has had to cancel a
planned photo shoot and in-person sitdown with Billboard. "I think it's
OK. It's still really red. I could've covered it up and tried to look
decent, but shouldn't my "Billboard" cover be a little less about that
and more about the music?" (The cover photo is an outtake from her album
shoot.)
If you've followed the headlines around Carey in the years since
2009's "Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel," you would know it hasn't always
been about the music. Since the birth of her twins Moroccan and Monroe
in April 2011, she has weathered a rocky stint as a judge on American
Idol in 2013, for which she was paid $18 million, according to People,
as well as an accident on a music video set that led to a dislocated
shoulder and cracked ribs. The injury preceded the latest in a series of
delays for her planned 14th album, which at one point was earmarked for
early 2013. Though her Miguel duet "#Beautiful" was a decent-sized hit
last summer, peaking at No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 with sales of
1.2 million (according to Nielsen SoundScan), a trio of other singles
failed to catch fire, most recently February's "You're Mine (Eternal),"
which spent a week on the Hot 100 at No. 88 and has sold only 56,000
copies.
No 'Beyonce' Strategy For Mariah Carey's New Album
But in late May, Carey hopes she can silence her naysayers and
super-serve her patient fans with the much-anticipated release of her
14th album, which at one point was intended as a digital-first,
all-at-once release a la "Beyoncé." Though her label Def Jam
now says an official pre-order is expected for later this week,
announcing the album's title, cover and tracklist, it's clear from
talking to Carey that she misses the good old days of the '90s. The time
when you could deliver an album the old-fashioned way, when you had to
go to the store to see the song names and the cover art. "I have to be
the one that announces this, especially the title," says Carey, noting
the album takes its name from a "personal possession of mine that's part
of an entity that I've had almost all my life."
The "Beyoncé" parallels would have made even more sense when you
consider that Beyonce was coming off an underperforming album (2011's
"4") before going the surprise route, much like Carey's "Memoirs"
produced just one top 10 hit ("Obsessed") and sold a disappointing
549,000 copies, low enough to cancel a planned remix album.
Carey will cop to a few of the prerelease singles not doing
particularly well, pausing to note that 2013's Stargate-produced "Almost
Home" was intended for the "Oz, Great and Powerful" soundtrack. "It was
never about, 'This is my album,' but I wasn't fully connected to that
song. I was in the middle of that other situation in my life, which we
will erase and pretend it never happened." (That "situation" being Idol,
which we'll get to later.) "You would think I would be all about the
singles-driven situation, and I am in a way, but with this particular
album I want my fans to hear it as a body of work," she says. "This is
my life since we last left off. Just picture a dot dot dot, and then
here's the album."
"Life happens, and that added to the making of this album,"
songwriter-producer Bryan-Michael Cox told "Billboard" in February.
"Over the past couple years we've added songs, scratched songs,
slow-baking this record like a honey-baked ham. And when you take a bite
of that ham — people will be extremely and pleasantly surprised."
Carey's label group Island Def Jam is probably best described as
cautiously optimistic about the album, declining to respond to multiple
fact-checking and interview requests for this story.
In terms of fans, anticipation for a new Carey album hasn't been this
high since her mid-2000s comeback, which saw 2005's "The Emancipation
of Mimi" go quadruple-platinum and turn "We Belong Together" into the
biggest radio hit of her career, spending 14 weeks atop the Hot 100 and
becoming Billboard's top song of the 2000s. But in addition to the
reteaming with Jermaine Dupri ("We Belong Together," "Always Be My
Baby") on two tracks for the new album, she has assembled a team of
collaborators that shows she has paid attention to the hip-hop and
R&B charts in recent years. There's tracks from of-the-moment
producers like Hit-Boy (Kanye West and Jay Z's "N***** In Paris") and
Mike Will Made It (Rihanna's "Pour It Up"); guest features from Wale,
Nas and Trey Songz; and even c ontributions from veeran arranger Larry
Gold and the Love Unlimited Orchestra and a "special guest that I'm not
allowed to reveal."
Talk to Carey about the album, and you'll get lengthy if cryptically
worded explanations about the material, making liberal use of favorite
words like "journey" ("If I use that word one more time I'll have to
start an '80s rock band"), "festive" (her time on Idol, she says, "was
not festive") and "moment" ("I just need a moment to finish this track
listing"). She'll call you "dahhhling," with a Zsa Zsa Gabor
affectation, and grill you on your "lambily" status (that's Mariah speak
for hardcore fans, or "lambs"). "There's no way I'll be able to quite
relive the splendor of certain moments — name that tune, lambily!" she
says at one point, asking if you've spotted her lyrical reference to
"The Roof " from 1997's "Butterfly."
7 Things From Mariah's Classic 'Fantasy' Video that She Should Do Today
As Carey began work in earnest on the project in 2012, a friend
compiled an exhaustive, 1,000- track playlist of all of Carey's catalog
and remixes, dubbed "The Ultimate MC Audio Collection." Through
revisiting her own 24-year career, Carey reminisced about forgotten
remixes from the '90s with producers like the late David Cole and her
early experiments with genre-fusing. "I will always lean toward R&B
in general, but I do think that merging hip-hop and R&B was one of
the best things that happened for me as a fan of music. There's this
whole pop and hip-hop mixing together thing now — first of all, it's not
new, and second of all, why are we acting like it is?"
The album will also showcase Carey's intro-spective, "morose" side,
which certain lambily have treasured through the years from deeply
personal cuts like "Looking In" (from 1995's "Daydream"), "Close My
Eyes" (from "Butterfly") and
"Petals" (from 1999's "Rainbow") — songs that offer an intimate
glimpse into the person behind all the diva behavior. "It's so good to
hear people say they grew up with me as the soundtrack to their life,
even though I was making it, so that was the soundtrack to my life as
well," she says.
It was Carey's reconnection with "Looking In" that shaped the final
phase of the current album. She performed the song live for the first
time with the New York Philharmonic in Central Park last July, just one
week after her shoulder injury, clad in a faux-fur sling that matched
her white ballgown. The song's lyrics were inspired by her unhappy
marriage from 1993 to 1998 to Tommy Mottola, and found her singing in
the third person about a girl who "dreams of all/ That she can never
be/She wades in insecu- rity, yeah/And she hides herself inside of me."
Carey broke down in tears at one point during the song, cautioning the
audience beforehand that it "requires a bit more stability than I have
right now. I kind of got in trouble for writing this song so I'm going
to try."
After the show, Carey revisited the songs she had already earmarked
for the ballad-heavy album and decided she needed a change of pace.
That's where two of the three Hit-Boy tracks came in, as well as a fresh
collab with Dupri, who became her latest manager thereafter. (Carey's
management underwent several changes in 2012 and 2013, including parting
ways with former Idol co-star Randy Jackson after many years together
and a brief stint with Coran Capshaw's Red Light Management.) "There
were certain parts of the album where I needed to be lifted up again. I
needed something uplifting." (That's a "Dreamlover" reference, lambily.)
That Carey is taking even more of a hands-on approach to her music
these days is no surprise from a woman who co-wrote all her No. 1
singles, and has also taken more aspects of her career in her own hands
amid her various management shifts and other endeavors. After being
"bamboozled" by the Idol experience when footage of her feud with fellow
judge Nicki Minaj leaked, for example, Carey says she would like to
executive-produce her next reality-competition venture. "I have another
project that I'm so very excited about that's finally coming to
fruition. I would want to do something that was authentic. And I did
feel that there were some truly talented singers on there this year,
last year, whenever that was. It's a blur, it has all been a blur, all
of it, dahhhling."
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But she's also in a rarefied class of superstars in their third
decade of fame who can still compete in the big leagues. Madonna, Cher
and Celine Dion continue to rank among Billboard's top-earning artists
more for their exhaustive touring work, not because they're still
getting the massive radio play and album sales of their respective
heydays. Carey, meanwhile, has never been much of a roadhorse (she
didn't even tour until 1993, when she played 10 theaters in support of
her third album, "Music Box") and still considers herself more of "a
studio rat" at heart.
"I love being in the studio, making Wall of Sound background vocals.
That's when I'm most at home, other than being with 'dem babies' now. I
love being onstage and connecting with the lambily most importantly, but
it's just that now nothing's just an experience with your fans and your
fans alone. It's on YouTube immediately, not 'Oh, that was an amazing
moment I just experienced.'" So until she's willing to do a global arena
tour or a Las Vegas residency, Carey will need to keep churning out
hits to extend her living legacy.
Dupri seems weary of the expectations that come with official
"comeback singles," which is why one of his first items of business as
Carey's manager last fall was releasing the ballad "The Art of Letting
Go" as a teaser track on Carey's Facebook page to set the tone for the
album, rather than the typical event strategy. Though "Letting Go" will
appear on the album along with "#Beautiful" and "You're Mine," the hope
is that the fans' response will democratize the typical album process
from here.
"The challenge with Mariah has always been if I like one record and
she likes another, you can never pick a single that satisfies
everybody," says Dupri. "If you just did what Beyonce did, she just gave
you 17 singles and you picked which record you like."
Even though Carey's latest album marks the longest gap between
albums, it certainly won't be her last, despite a recent interview with
Bravo's Andy Cohen on "Watch What Happens Live" where she indicated she
might be treating it as such. Still, it signifies something of a make-
or-break moment at this phase in her storied career as Billboard's
second-most-decorated Hot 100 chart-topper, next to The Beatles.
"I will always make music.When I said [this album] could be my last,
that's because tomorrow's not promised to anyone. When I release
anything, it's difficult — it could be a performance that you don't love
and it's like, 'Great, everybody's going to pick this apart,' and
that's it. What I'm trying to say is I wanted this to be something I
could be proud of, whether it's like, 'Yay, No. 1 song!,' and this and
that. However things end up happening, we've all worked so hard. The
true lambily have all worked so hard to break all these Billboard
records and to have this incredible experience with me that I want them
to have this almost as a gift."
