If you’ve been wondering all your life how Mariah Carey, the elusive chanteuse who’s known for her legendary works in the R&B, hip hop, pop, and soul genres, would sound like singing alternative rock songs, then you’d have to wonder no more.
The five-time Grammy Award winner broke the internet a couple of weeks ago when she revealed it herself that she in fact wrote, recorded, and released a full-length alt-rock album around the same time she was making her chart-topping “Daydream” in 1995.
The album is titled “Someone’s Ugly Daughter” and it was released under the band name “Chick”.
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
The tweet Carey posted on September 27 comes with a video containing an excerpt from her upcoming autobiography “The Meaning of Mariah Carey” where she revealed the secret.
In the memoir she wrote:
“I’d bring my little alt-rock song to the band and hum a silly guitar riff. 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. 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. You know the one who seems to be carefree with their feelings and 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.”
The 41-second video is accompanied by the track “Hermit”, which was one of the 11 songs featured in the secret album.
During an appearance on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” to promote her book, Carey talked a little bit more about her secret creative adventure.
In the interview, she shared that she wanted to do a lot more for the album. She said she’d even shot a music video where she was disguised and unrecognizable, but her label was against the idea of releasing it. So the project never saw the light of day.
Meanwhile Carey’s producer Dana Jon Chappelle shared with the Rolling Stones that the album “was all very spontaneous and impromptu.”
“A lot of times, [Carey] would write a song out and lyrically she’d be done in 10, 15 minutes,” Chappelle added.
According to the same interview with Chappelle, Carey drew inspiration from brands like Green Day, L-7, and Sleater-Kinney.
To be honest the only thing we’ve ever heard from the album is the short clip included in the tweet Mimi posted, but we could easily tell it’s totally movie soundtrack material. And seriously? We’d love to hear more!
Here’s to hoping she’d get to release another alternative rock album now that the cat’s out of the bag. *Fingers crossed!*