Mariah Carey is working on a new version of her alt-rock album that she plans to release in the future.
Originally released in the late 1990s, Mariah secretly worked on ‘Someone’s Ugly Daughter’ at the same time as her fifth album ‘Daydream’, but the record company wasn’t a fan of the LP and went on to release a re-recorded version with her collaborator Clarissa Dane instead.
Having revealed the project in her 2020 memoir ‘The Meaning of Mariah Carey’, the diva tells the ‘Rolling Stone Music Now‘ podcast she has located the original record and will release it in some form.
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
“[It] will become something we should hear, but also, I’m working on a version where there will be another artist working with me…. Possibly something built around the album…” she explains.
“This was my outlet and nobody knew about it. I would just write these things. I’d say, ‘Can you play [sings guitar part] to the guitar player who happened to be there while we’re working on records like Always Be My Baby and One Sweet Day and eventually Fantasy and whatever from that era.
“It was like, ‘Let me just do this.’ Because after the session, why not? There’s energy. And we were like working for whatever, 15, 16 hours on scrutinising stuff.
“And then we just made this record at the same time. I would write the lyrics, go and sing it. There was a fear [from the record company] because some of the lyrical content was not what people were [expecting]. I honestly wanted to put the record out back then under the same pseudonym and just let them discover that it’s me, but that idea was kind of stomped and squashed. So Clarissa came in.
“And yeah, there were a lot of big records that were in that genre, that grunge moment… And of course there was the Courtney Love era of Hole and all that going on at the time. I even did the artwork! The artwork for the album was like the dead roach and some lipstick.”
Although the record has never been heard as Mariah planned it, the singer – who is currently celebrating 25 years of her seminal ‘Butterfly’ album – maintains working on the project gave her “freedom” while she was in an unhappy marriage to record company boss Tommy Mottola.
“I had no freedom during that time. That was my freedom. I would drive around with my assistant with the top down in upstate New York and be screaming the lyrics to these songs that nobody else knew. It was my release and it was just fun,” adds Mariah.
“I started out like, ‘Oh, this is just for laughs, whatever,’ like we’re having fun. But then I was like, ‘No, this is me screaming. This is literally what I’m going through.’”
