We still haven’t forgotten about Mariah Carey’s secret grunge album — and neither has she!
In an interview with Saturday night live star Bowen Yang and comedian Matt Rogers on their podcast Las Culturistas from iHeartMedia and Will Ferrell’s Big Money Players Network reminded Carey that there is still an audience waiting for her long-lost grunge album.
“Can you drop that grunge album?” Rogers asked.
“I know, right?” Carey, 55, responded. “I’m so mad I haven’t done it yet … but who do I leave it to?”
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Mariah Carey performs in Las Vegas in April 2024.
Denise Truscello/Getty
Bowen and Rogers jokingly toyed with the idea of starting their own label and suggested the “chic” idea of releasing it to a “Garage Band or some, like, grungy thing.”
“I could do that. It is good album,” Carey said.
In 1995, while Carey was recording what would become her hit album Daydream, The R&B icon quietly recorded a grunge album. Despite being at the height of the alt-rock boom in the mid-’90s, label executives didn’t want her name attached to the project.
“I got into trouble for making this album — an alternative album — because back then everything was super-controlled by the powers that be,” Carey explained in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 in 2020. “I never really was like, ‘Oh, we will publish it.’ But then I thought I should post it under a pseudonym, but that got squashed.”
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Mariah Carey on ‘Las Culturistas’.
iHeartMedia/Rachel Kaplan
Inspired by her troubled marriage to Tommy Mottola (whom she divorced two years after the album was recorded) and bands such as Hole and Sleater-Kinney, Carey recorded what would become Eel Tree Somebody’s Ugly Daughter.
“I was playing with the style of the airy grunge, punk light white singers that were popular at the time. You know the ones that seemed so carefree with their feelings and image,” she wrote in her 2020 memoir. Meaning of Mariah Carey. “They could be angry, anxious and disheveled, with old shoes, creased slippers and unruly eyebrows, while my every move was so calculated and manicured. I wanted to break free, release and express my misery – but I also wanted to laugh.”
Her longtime producer Walter Afanasieff told Fairies that Sony Music reportedly renamed the band Chick, forced Carey to change explicit lyrics and brought in her friend Clarissa Dane to handle lead vocals. Carey’s backing vocals remained and she was credited as “D. Sue.”
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Mariah Carey performs in Las Vegas in May 2023.
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In 2022, Carey revealed that the original recordings Somebody’s Ugly Daughter with her as the lead singer they still exist. “This was my exhaust valve and nobody knew about it. Most people, I’d rather they didn’t even know about it until we decided exactly what was going to happen with that quest to find those vocals,” she said in an interview with Rolling Stone Music Now.
“At that time I had no freedom. It was my freedom,” she explained. “I’d drive around with my assistant with the top down in upstate New York and we’d scream lyrics to these songs that no one else knew.”
There are used physical copies of the officially released Chick album, but the album is still not streaming. Two songs, “Demented” and “Malibu,” are available online with music videos.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education