MARIAH the Grunge years
A HOLE NEW SIDE TO MIMI AS THE DIVA CHANNELS COURTNEY
MOVE over Courtney Love... while Mariah Carey’s warbling ballads were smashing the charts, she secretly recorded a grunge album.
The diva longed to follow Hole frontwoman Courtney into grunge rock during the 1990s.
Mariah, 50, says she recorded her rock tracks on the sly to exorcise the ‘rage’ she experienced during her shortlived marriage to Sony Music executive Tommy Mottola.
The Fantasy singer said her grunge album has been out there without us knowing for 25 years, under the band name Chick. ‘I created an alter ego artist and her Ziggy Stardust-like spoof band,’ she says in her new autobiography The Meaning Of Mariah Carey. ‘My character was a dark-haired brooding Goth girl who wrote and sang ridiculous tortured songs.
‘I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time.
‘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.’
She said that while recording her hit album Daydream, she would go off into a corner after each session and ‘scribble down some lyrics’.
Mimi added: ‘In five minutes, I’d have a song. 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.’
She released the Chick album in 1995, just as her two-year marriage to Mottola, now 71, was crumbling. With lyrics like ‘I don’t want to kiss you with morning breath’ on her secret track Love Is A Scam, it’s easy to guess what she was singing about.