Mariah Carey has unearthed the original recordings for her unreleased alt-rock album.
Amid her #MC30 celebrations, Mariah revealed she had quietly contributed to every original track on Chick’s 1995 album Someone’s Ugly Daughter and teased her “quest to unearth the version of this album with my lead vocals”.
Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music, the star, who just dropped new single Oh Santa! with Ariana Grande and Jennifer Hudson, opened up on the project, admitting: “It’s been so long and I never talked about it with anybody…
“I don’t even have a copy, but I did the artwork myself,” she explained. “I actually just found the version with my vocals, but I need to find the board mixes from back then. Only my closest friends and the people that I actually made the album with knew about it.”
The diva originally planned to release the album “under an alias and then let people discover it” – however her plans were quashed by label bosses and her then-husband Tommy Mottola. It was eventually released by Chick, led by Mariah’s friend Clarissa Dane, around the same time she dropped her Daydream album.
“One of the people that was so cool to me, before I ever had a deal or ever had any of that stuff, Clarissa, came in, and because I got kind of in trouble for making this album, the alternative album, because back then everything was super controlled by the powers that be,” shares the Always Be My Baby singer.
“I said, can you come in, once they were like, you can’t do this, the label and whatever, once the label tried to control me, as they tend to do, or always did with me, then I was like, ‘Come in and just sing on top of what I did,’ and we collaborated with it.
“But I was so married to what I had done, even though it was like a fun escape and it was all jokes, but then again, at the end of the day, once I live with it and listen to it, I was like, this is freeing and empowering, and I’m living for the moment.
“So I just kind of kept it to myself. I had done the album art. I did the whole thing. I’ve never even talked about this,” recalls Mimi. “It was just fun. And honestly, it was so necessary. I think I sort of survived through that, and I literally made a whole album and just kept it to myself.”
Clarissa previously clarified she doesn’t own the recordings from the Chick sessions in a tweet to Retro Pop, sharing: “I do not have the Chick tracks but hope that Mariah can find them. She is amazing and I am sure she will.”
