Mariah’s “Obsessed” (Original and Remix Versions) ~ UPDATE

• Posted on July 10, 2009 at 6:21 am

“Obsessed” on Billboard Charts

Find Mariah’s chart positions in Billboard magazine issue scheduled for July 18, 2009.

“Obsessed” Billboard Hot 100 Airplay: #60 (Debut) Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs: #31 (Last week #37) Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay: #31 (Last week #37) Billboard Hot Adult R&B Airplay: #34 (Last week #37) Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles: #1 (Last week #13)

 

From Billboard’s Chart Beat:
Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed” lifts 37-31 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and debuts on Hot 100 Airplay at No. 60. The real action, however, should come next week, when the lead track from “Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel,” due Aug. 25, will make a lofty entrance on the Billboard Hot 100 following its release to the digital market Tuesday (July 7). The song will face competition on next week’s Hot 100 from Hannah Montana’s “He Could Be the One,” also new at digital retailers as of this week.

 

Congratulations to Mariah on the Power Rankings’ first-ever No. 1 debut. On a side note, another notch in Mariah’s impressive SOTS CV are her gritty choices in remix partners: following in the footsteps of O.D.B. and Jadakiss come Gucci Mane and the official “Obsessed” remix.

“Shout-out to Mariah Carey and her whole squad and my boy Chris Lighty,” Gucci said. “He got me and Mariah together. I appreciate it. He put me on there as well as her. Both of them are smart for doing that. The song came out hard. Mariah knew I wanted to do a song with her. It finally happened, and it turned out hard. I just flew up there to New York, went in the studio with her. I flew right out and went back on the road. When I do a song with people, I like to really get in the studio with them so I could feel they swag and they could feel mine. The music comes out better.”

Mariah Daily

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Behind The #1’s ~ Mariah Carey

• Posted on July 8, 2009 at 4:26 am

Mariah Carey And Trey Lorenz Perform ‘I’ll Be There’

Michael Jackson’s tribute kicked off with a heartfelt rendition of the singer’s soft melody. (7.7.09) 
 

I’LL BE THERE

When MTV asked Mariah Carey to star in one of their “Unplugged” shows, she had little experience performing live. “She was very young and very shy,” confirms producer Walter Afanasieff. “So we put together a very easy show because of the rules of ‘MTV Unplugged.’ You can’t do anything electric.”

Two days before the taping of the show, Carey added one remake of an old hit to her repertoire. “I’ve been listening to Michael [Jackson] since I was a baby,” she told Edna Gunderson of USA Today. “When he was a little boy, his singing was so angelic. It was unbelievable that such a voice could come from a child. He was a big influence on me.” Carey chose the biggest Jackson 5 hit, “I’ll Be There,” as the oldie she would perform on “Unplugged.” She could have chosen almost anything, according to Afanasieff. “She actually knows every song ever written,” he claims. “She’s a walking encyclopedia of songs, from every Stevie Wonder song all the way to every Police record ever made. She carries around this ‘hard disk’ full of songs. And there’s nothing she can’t sing.”

There were special advantages in selecting “I’ll Be There,” says Afanasieff. “Having the young Michael Jackson be in the same sort of key as a female singer made it easy. Also making it easy was the fact that the Jackson 5 had one of the older brothers singing the almost-duet. It fell into place because here’s Trey Lorenz standing next to her.” Lorenz, from Florence, South Carolina, was a close friend and backing singer for Carey, and got his big break by joining her on “I’ll Be There.” That collaboration led to his own solo album on Columbia, with Carey producing six tracks. Her work on “Unplugged” helped her become a better producer, Carey told Melinda Newman in Billboard. “‘Unplugged’ taught me a lot about myself because I tend to nitpick everything I do and make it a little too perfect because I’m a perfectionist. I also learned a lot from working with Trey because when you’re working with another singer and the singer’s going, ‘Oh, I hate that, that sounds horrible,’ and you’re going, ‘No, it’s great,’ that’s what everyone always does to me. I’ll always go over the real raw stuff and now I’ve gotten to the point where I understand that the raw stuff is usually better.”

Carey’s “I’ll Be There,” sounding very close to the original version by the Jackson 5, was issued as a single by Columbia. That surprised Afanasieff. “We were thinking studio albums were the way for Mariah. And all of a sudden [the label] said, ‘We’ve decided to release “I’ll Be There” as a single,’ and everyone said, ‘This is going to postpone a new studio album,’ which we were already starting to write and produce. But it was a pleasant departure. Once in awhile it’s really a joy to break away from the norm.”

“I’ll Be There” had been a milestone in the career of the Jackson 5. It was their fourth consecutive number one single, and made them the first act to reach the top of the Hot 100 with its first four releases. Ironically, Carey was the one to break that record when “Emotions” became her fifth consecutive number one. Out of her first 10 chart singles, only “Can’t Let Go” and “Make It Happen” didn’t reach the summit.

“I’ll Be There” was the eigth song in the rock era to be number one by two different artists, following “Go Away Little Girl,” “The Loco-Motion,” “Please Mr. Postman,” “Venus,” “Lean On Me,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” and “When A Man Loves A Woman.”

 

VISION OF LOVE 

Mariah Carey was born March 22, 1970, in New York City. Her mother Patricia named her after the song “They Call The Wind Mariah” from the Lerner and Loewe music Paint Your Wagon. It’s unlikely her mother was aware that on the day Mariah was born, the number one song in Britain was “Wand’rin Star” by Lee Marvin – from Paint Your Wagon.

Mariah began singing early, when she was four years old. By six, she was writing poetry. Patricia was a vocal coach, a jazz vocalist and a singer with the New York City Opera, and Mariah’s older brother and sister allowed their youngest sibling to listen to their Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin 45s.

When Mariah was 16, her brother paid for her to make a 24-track demo tape at a Manhattan studio. “We needed someone to play the keyboards for a song I had written with a guy named Gavin Christopher,” Mariah remembers. “We called someone and he couldn’t come, so by accident we stumbled upon Ben (Marguiles). Ben came to the session, and he can’t really play keyboards very well – he’s really more of a drummer – but after that day, we kept in touch, and we just sort of clicked as writers.”

Marguiles had a studio set up at Bedworks, his father’s cabinet factory in Chelsea. Mariah was still a high school student when she got together with Ben and wrote their first song, “Here We Go Round Again.” “It was this real Motown thing,” Ben remembers. “She wrote all the verses out. We were very excited because she sounded incredible. That was the beginning of the collaborating.”

Mariah and Ben worked together for a couple of years, as she graduated from high school and supported herself with jobs like waiting tables and checking coats. “The music kept us going,” Marguiles explains. “I didn’t have much equipment, but we had a way of making demos sound incredible.”

A friend of Mariah’s who played drums for Brenda K Starr mentioned that a back-up singer had quit, and suggested Mariah audition for the job. “I really didn’t want to do it, but I said it’s gotta be better than what I’m doing now,” Mariah recalls. “So I went to the audition, and Brenda was such a great person.” She was not only hired, she became close friends with Brenda.

Back in New York during a break in her tour, Brenda invited Mariah to attend a party thrown by CBS Records. Brenda handed Mariah’s demo tape to CBS Records Group president Tommy Mottola, who listened to it in his limo on the way home. After hearing the first two songs, he went back to the party to find the singer. She had already left, and there was no phone number on the tape. Tommy spent the weekend trying to track down Mariah, but Brenda’s managers didn’t know who she was and he had to wait until Monday. “I got this message that he had called and they wanted me to come to CBS Records, and I was so excited,” says Mariah.

Rhett Lawrence, who had produced CBS artists like Johnny Kemp and Earth, Wind, & Fire, was asked to fly to New York and listen to the demo tape. “They described her as a girl who was 18 and had the most incredible voice you’ve ever heard,” Lawrence reports. “I literally got goosebumps on my arms when I heard her sing. I couldn’t believe the power and maturity in her voice.”

Carey went to Los Angeles to work with Lawrence. He heard a rough version of “Vision of Love,” a song Mariah and Ben wrote after she signed with Columbia. Described by Mariah as not so much a love song but a celebration of her life at the time, the demo sounded very different from what would be the finished product; according to Lawrence, “it was a different tempo at the time… a ’50s sort of shuffle.” Working with Ben and Mariah in the studio, Lawrence changed the tempo and used Mariah’s vocals from the demo as a second vocal tag of the song. Released as Mariah’s debut single, “Vision of Love” debuted on the Hot 100 the week of June 2, 1990, and was number one nine weeks later.

 

LOVE TAKES TIME

Columbia Records literally stopped the presses for Mariah Carey’s “Love Takes Time.”

Mariah’s debut album for the label was completed and being mastered when she wrote the song with Ben Marguiles. “It was sort of a gospelish thing I was improvising, then we began working on it,” Marguiles relates. “It was on a work tape that we had…and we recorded a very quick demo. It was just a piano vocal demo – I played live piano, and she sang it.”

Mariah was on a mini-tour of 10 states, playing acoustically with a piano player and three back-up singers. While on a company plane, she played the demo of “Love Takes Time” for Columbia Records president Don Ienner. “All the important guys were on the plane,” Marguiles recalls. “(Tommy) Mottola, Ienner, and Bobby Colomby.” Mariah was told the song was a “career-maker,” and that it had to go on the first album. Mariah protested – her album was already being mastered, and she intended this ballad for her next release.

The demo was sent to producer Walter Afanasieff. Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1958, Afanasieff grew up in San Fancisco. He met producer Narada Michael Walden there in 1981, and first worked with him in the studio on Aretha Franklin’s Who’s Zoomin’ Who album. When Mariah flew west to work with Narada on some tracks for her first album,Tommy Mottola and Don Ienner were impressed with Afanasieff’s work and gave him an executive staff producer job with the label.

“I guess to see if he made the right choice, (Tommy) called me up one day,” remember Afanasieff. “He said, ‘We’ve got this Mariah Carey album done, but there’s a song that she and Ben Marguiles wrote that is phenomenal, and I want to try everything we can to put it on the album.’ I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ and he said. ‘You only have a couple of days, but are you ready to cut it?’ I couldn’t believe the opportunity that it was. I’d never produced anything by myself up until that time.”

The demo was very close to what Mottola wanted the finished produce to be, according to Afanasieff. “We cut the song and the music and the basics in about a day – and the only reason is this deadlinel. It was do it or we were gonna miss out on the whole thing. We got the tape and recorded everything and we got on the plane and went to New York (and) did her vocals. She did all the backgrounds, practically sang all night…We came back to the studio that afternoon, and we had to fix one line very quickly, and then (engineer) Dana (Jon Chapelle) and I got back on the plane with the tape, went back to the studio in Sausalito, and mixed it. So it was a three-day process: a day and a half for music, kind of like a day for vocals, and a day for mixing.”

Afanasieff heard from Columbia executives as soon as they received the mix. They wanted Mariah’s vocal a little louder, so a remix was quickly completed. The producer asked if the song would still make the debut album, and was told, “We’re going to do our best.”

When the album was released, “Love Takes Time” was not listed on the cassette or compact disc. “(On) some of the original first copies of the record, they didn’t have time to print the name of the song,” Marguiles laughs. “And so the song’s on there, but it doesn’t say that it’s on there. It was a song that actually was strong enough to stop the pressing…I don’t know if they had to throw away a few hundred copies.”

After “Vision Of Love” had a four-week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, Columbia released “Love Takes Time” as a single. It debuted at number 73 (the same position that “Vision Of Love” entered) the week of September 15, 1990, and became Mariah’s second consecutive number one hit eight weeks later.

 

SOMEDAY

“Someday” was the third single released from Mariah Carey’s debut album, and the third single to go to number one. “That started out as a bass line, sort of a drum-machine, almost hip-hop type groove,” says co-writer Ben Marguiles. “Now people call is new jack swing, but that stuff was going on before all these terms came about. It evolved out of an improvisational track with some very strong changes and a very harmonic structure. Mariah has an ability to improvise vocally and come up with great melody lines, great hooks. We generally work on a chorus first, but she would sing melody ideas through the verse sections and it came about that way.”

Marguiles explains how fast Mariah came up with the words: “In the amount of time I would be playing around with the arrangement and coming up with some new change or something like that, she’d be sitting there writing out lyrics, then we’d demo it. I mean, we’d start turning the tape machine on, turning the computers on, and just start doing it.”

“Someday” was one of four songs that Marguiles and Carey included on the singer’s demo tape. “All the demos that ended up going to CBS were very elaborate arrangements,” Ben notes. “They were very close to what’s on the albums, if not almost exactly.”

Tommy Mottola of CBS Records asked Anglo-American producer Ric Wake, who had been working with Arista artist Taylor Dayne, to listen to Mariah Carey’s demo. “It was obvious that she was great – she was amazing,” says Wake, who met with Mottola on a Wednesday. The CBS Records Group president asked Wake if he could start working with Mariah in Thursday. “Mariah came over to my house the next day, we wrote ‘There’s Got To Be A Way,’ and it went from there – we did four songs together.”

One of the tracks that Wake produced was “Someday.” “I loved that song right from the beginning,” he acknowledges. “Tommy gave me a tape of 12 songs, and at the time, I think someone else was going to do it. It was up in the air, and Mariah called me up one day and said, ‘I’d love you to do it if you want to do it.’ It was great – I’m glad she called me.

“I remember the way that demo was; I wasn’t sure how she wanted to do it…We did it in about two, three hours.”

Marguiles liked the final version of their song “because it came off really simple and clean, and the point came across. Nothing was covered up. The original arrangement and production were very simple and funky. It had a simplicity to it that kind of drew you into it. To take it and make it too much of a production would have ruined the vibe of the song.”

When she was first signed to Columbia, Mariah wanted to produce the album herself with Marguiles. “I wasn’t open to working with a superstar producer,” she said in Rolling Stone. Ben elaborates: “You have your ideas and your creations, and sometimes it’s difficult. You’re seeing your songs come to fruition, but at the same time, you want to have a say in how your babies turn out. These things start out like the nucleus of the embry of an idea. You sit down and start playing, improvising, and it comes to the point where it turns into a good demo; then you want to hear it. If you’re a strong musician, or you’re inclined to produce and arrange all that stuff, sometimes it’s hard to hand over your creations like that. But it’s inevitably what always happens, and you hope that people handle them with care.”

“Someday” entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 37 on January 19, 1991. Seven weeks later, Mariah Carey knocked Whitney Houston’s “All The Man That I Need” off the top of the chart and moved in for a two-week stay.

 

I DON’T WANNA CRY

 
When “I Don’t Wanna Cry” went to number one, Mariah Carey became the first artist since the Jackson Five to have her first four chart singles top the Billboard Hot 100.

“I Don’t Wanna Cry” was produced and co-written by Narada Michael Walden, who had already produced number one hits for Whitney Houston, Starship and Aretha Franklin and George Michael. The producer first heard about Mariah when he received a phone call from CBS Records Group president Tommy Mottola. “I promised when I was in New York, I would sit down and meet with her,” says Walden, “and I did. She was very shy, and I asked her what she liked. She said she liked George Michael, so I got an idea of where she was coming from. Then we set up a day to actually go and write.”

At this point, Narada had not heard Mariah’s vocals. “The first time I heard her sing was in a writing session at the Hit Factory, where we wrote some songs. After working on three or four songs, I wanted us to slow the tempo down. A big part of my raising asa kid are songs like (those recorded) by Chuck Jackson…’I Don’t Want To Cry,’ ‘Any Day Now,’ those kind of really dramatic ballads, or ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ by Percy Sledge, those ‘crying’ kind of ballads. I kind of pulled it down from the sky and started singing this thing to her, and she got into it.”

Having worked with both Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, Narada is in a unique position to compare the two singers who have been compared so often in the press. “Both are tremendous singers. Whitney comes more from being raised and singing in church – I mean, first-hand experience with her aunts and nieces, from her influence from Aretha as a little kid, from Dionne Warwick, and from her mother, the great Cissy Houston. She had all that to draw on. On Mariah’s side, I know she’s a great listener. She took to heart Aretha and a lot of great singers, from Gladys Knight on down.

“It’s like the difference between, say, Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson, or Tommy Hearns and Sugar Ray Leonard. Both great track stars, both great boxers – and I’m honored to be able to work with both of them.

“Mariah is very astute in the studio, very picky. I don’t mean to make it sound like a negative; for her, it’s a positive, because she knows she wants to hear herself sound a certain way. For example, there’s a lick on ‘I Don’t Wanna Cry’ that I was really happy with, and I think at first she was, too. But after she lived with it, she wanted us to fix it. I don’t even know if we fixed it two or three times, but I had to fly the tape back to her in New York. She went in the studio, fixed that lick, and added other stuff onto it. I called her back and said, ‘Look, I used your new lick on that one thing because you like it, but the other stuff you’re adding on, you really don’t need.’ Then she gave in.

“I think a lot of that is what you experience when you’re making your first album. You gotta remember, Mariah was 19, 20 years old, making her first album. She really wanted it to be special.”

Narada found working with Mariah very similar to his experience with George Michael. “With George Michael, I actually had to have him stop singing, because he had me erase good vocals. He wanted me to keep going, and I said no, because I knew in my heart I already had it. The same thing with Mariah – I knew I had it. She feels if she sings more, maybe she’ll go beyond it. And you know what? God bless her, in some cases, she does.”

“I Don’t Wanna Cry” jumped onto the Hot 100 at number 50 the week of April 6, 1991, just as “Someday” fell out of the top 10. Seven weeks later, Mariah returned to the top of the chart.

 

HERO

If “Hero” sounds like it was meant to be heard over the end credits of a film, there’s a good reason. Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis starred in a movie for Columbia Pictures called Hero. Producer Walter Afanasieff recalls, “The people over at Epic Records were going to do the soundtrack for the film. They wanted to have Mariah sing the theme to it, but they didn’t really think they could because at that time you couldn’t get near Mariah to do anything film-wise. So they wanted to try the next best thing, which was to have us write something.”

The film was screened for Afanasieff in Los Angeles and he was told that Gloria Estefan would probably be asked to sing a title theme. At the time, the producer was working with Carey on her Music Box album. “I went to New York and we were in the studio and came to a break. I was sitting at the piano and told Mariah about this movie. Within two hours, we had this incredible seed for this song, ‘Hero.’ It was never meant for Mariah to sing. In her mind, we were writing a song for Gloria Estefan for this movie. And we went into an area that Mariah didn’t really go into – in her words, it was a little bit too schmaltzy or too pop ballady or too old-fashioned as far as melody and lyrics.”

The pair was almost finished writing the song when Tommy Mottola, president and COO of Sony Music Entertainment and Carey’s fiance (later her husband), walked into the studio. Hearing the song they were working on, he asked them what it was, and Carey replied, “This is a song for the film Hero.” Afanasieff recalls Mottola responding, “Are you kidding me? You can’t give this song to this movie. This is too good. Mariah, you have to take this song. You have to do it.”

Initially, Carey was guided by the subject of the film, but Afanasieff acknowledges that the artist made it a very personal song. After she decided not to give the song away, she completed the lyric and made it her own. The producer went back to the soundtrack people and told them, “You know what? I didn’t come up with anything.” Estefan never heard the tune originally meant for her, and the song that ended up in the soundtrack was “Heart Of A Hero,” written, produced and recorded by Luther Vandross.

Afanasieff and Carey came up with a couple of different versions of “Hero” in the studio. “There was a simpler performance on tape and a more difficult one, with Mariah singing out more, with more licks. But we chose a happy medium. The song really calls for not anything really fancy. But she’s always fighting the forces inside of her because she’s her own devil’s advocate. She wants to do something that’s so over the top and use her talents and the voice she has. But she also knows she has to restrain herself and do what the music really calls for.

Before the song hit number one on the Hot 100, Carey announced that she was donating the proceeds from the sale of the single to the families of the victims of a December 7 shooting rampage on the Long Island Rail Road. Three days after the tragedy, Carey was on stage at Madison Square Garden when she dedicated “Hero” to the three men who subdued the gunman. Carey, who had been a frequent passenger on the LIRR rush-hour ride out of the Penn Station, had been shocked by the senseless brutality of the incident. Afanasieff remembers the audience reaction: “We started playing the song, and there was a guy standing in the aisle and the light from the stage hit him. He was a grown man and he had tears streaming down his face. And I looked out and saw so many people crying and realized the power of the song.”

 

ONE SWEET DAY

Superstar teamings are irresistable to radio programmers hungry for hits. It was inevitable that the pairing of Diana Ross and Lionel Richie would produce a number one song, just as there was no doubt that Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder would capture the top spot, or that George Michael and Elton John would achieve pole position. So how could anyone doubt that Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men would achieve similar success? In fact, they surpassed all other previous superstar match-ups, first by entering the Hot 100 at number one, and then by remaining there a record-shattering 16 weeks.

Carey says the idea for “One Sweet Day” was not inspired by the loss of one specific person in her life, but by several people she knew. “I told Walter [Afanasieff] the idea and started the usual process of me directing him as to what I’m hearing in my head and taking it from there – the two of us going to the bridge and developing the song. I had the first verse before I even sang it for Walter and the chorus was basically there. If I don’t have the hook off the top of my head, it usually takes me a long time to get it, but that was really there. And then I stopped, because I wanted to finish writing it with Boyz II Men.”

Afansieff elaborates, “At the time, Boyz II Men were the biggest thing out there. Through managers, we landed a meeting with the four guys to see if they would be interested. They loved the song. Mariah was in the studio singing it as the track was playing. She was singing the melody and one of the guys starting singing the counter melody.”

Nathan Morris of Boyz II Men was surprised at what he heard. “Mariah sang the verse she had already written. The lyrics and the idea and [a song I had written] coincided. Which was awkward, because I didn’t know she was writing a song that pertained to what I was writing as well. I told her I had a song I had written two months earlier which was in the same vein.” Afanasieff recalls what happened next: “We merged the two songs together lyrically, and a bit melodically, and that’s why they’re writers on the song.”

The actual recording session was chaotic, the producer notes. “It was crazy! They had film crews and videos guys. I’m at the board trying to produce. (Boyz II Men) are the busiest guys in the world. Their managers and bodyguards are in the waiting room and it’s 4:30 and they have until 7 o’clock. You’ve got four guys and you haven’t even worked out their parts yet. So I was sweating. And these guys are running around having a ball, because Mariah and them are laughing and screaming and they’re being interviewed. And I’m tapping people on the shoulder. ‘We’ve got to get to the microphone!’ They’re gone in a couple of hours, so I recorded everything they did, praying that it was enough. After going home to my studio, I put the tracks together and did a rough blend of the four guys. And then Mariah went in and did some more vocals to fill in a little bit, because it sounded like it’s all Boyz II Men and there wasn’t enough Mariah Carey on it.”

Carey watchers all over the world had their eyes on the Hot 100 as “One Sweet Day” broke the 14-week record for remaining number one. “I didn’t even focus on it until the very, very end,” says Carey. “It’s just not good. I don’t think it’s the right vibe to have. But it’s definitely a blessing and I’m very grateful for it.”

 

MY ALL

Mariah Carey approached the making of Butterfly the same way she had begun her previous albums. “The corporate world said it’s time to go in and make another album,” she explains. But it was not business as usual. “My personal life started taking a different turn and the songs reflected that. It was also the first time I was able to experiment with different types of producers who had inspired me, like Puffy and Stevie J. I was working with Walter Afanasieff again, but I was dictating a little bit more in terms of production. I was saying this has to be a little more sparse, we need to tone it down here. It was like the real me coming out.”

One of the last tracks produced by Afanasieff for Carey was “My All.” Carey recalls, “I had gone to Puerto Rico and was influenced by Latin music at that moment. When I came back, the melody was in my head. It was at a melancholy point in my life and the song reflects the yearning that was going on in me. It was like being in a situation but you want to break free and you can’t, so you’re confined yet you’re releasing those emotions through the lyrics and the actual act of singing. That’s why I think a lot of people felt very strongly about that song, because the emotion is clear when you listen to it.

Although Carey ultimately recorded “My All” in Afanasieff’s San Francisco studio, they wrote the song in the studio in Carey’s mansion in upstate New York. “It was one of the finest studios I’ve ever seen in anyone’s home,” says Afanasieff. “It’s no longer there. I remember being in the back part of the studio where my keyboards were set up and we were sitting there late at night, writing.” “There was a new keyboard that had come out, the Trinity, and I was strolling through some sounds and came upon a particular sound from a steel acoustic guitar. I played these really beautiful chord changes that eventually led to ‘My All.’ She started singing and I started playing and we came up with the basis of the song. I put a little drum groove down and it was one of the easier songs to write with her.”

The Spanish guitar sound on “My All” tapped into Carey and Afanasieff’s roots, although Carey doesn’t remember listening to a lot of Latin music when she was growing up. “I didn’t spend much time with my paternal grandfather, who is the one who has Spanish in him, but I’m sure when I went to Queens to visit him, I would hear that music and subconsciously it was in me.” Afanasieff was born in Brazil, but comes from a Russian background. “Hearing Russian music and Latin and Brazilian music my whole life, I went into an old-fashioned sort of Russian, Latin-Spanish chord progression melody, which was hardly being done.”

 

ALWAYS BE MY BABY


With “Always Be My Baby,” the third single from Daydream, Mariah Carey achieved her 11th number one hit, putting her in a three-way tie with Madonna and Whitney Houston as the solo female artist with the most number one hits to this date. “Always Be My Baby” also made Carey three for three, with all the singles from her fifth full-length studio album hitting the top of the Hot 100. There would be no more singles from the album after “Always Be My Baby,” although “Forever” would become an airplay hit.

In search to find producers to work with on Daydream, one of the people Carey turned to was Jermaine Dupri. She knew she wanted to collaborate with the Atlanta-based musician ever since she heard his production of “Jump” for Kris Kross. He had also achieved success writing and producing for the female quintet Xscape on his own So So Def label. “He’s got a very distinct vibe,” says Carey. “Jermaine, Manuel (Seal), and I sat down and Jermaine programmed the drums. I told him the feel that I wanted and Manuel put his hands on the keyboards and I started singing the melody. We went back and forth with the bridge and the B-section. I had the outline of the lyrics and started singing ‘Always be my baby’ off the top of my head.”

Like other producers before him, Dupri was impressed with Carey’s vocal abilities. “She can pretty much do anything with her voice,” he says. “She’s really strong vocally.” Carey’s talents extend to her backing vocals as well. On “Always Be My Baby,” like many of her other songs, the backing vocals take on some of the burden that instruments do in other artists’ songs. “The background vocals are an important part of the whole picture for me,” she explains. “That’s why I like to do them myself a lot of the time, or at least initially I’ll lay down the tracks. I’ll double my voice or do a couple of tracks of my own voice. It’s easy for me to match my voice. And then if I’m going to use other background singers, I’ll let them go on top of mine. To me, on those kinds of records, the hook is really important. And I tend to do a lot of ad-libs, so it can get lost.”

Less than a year after “Always Be My Baby” hit number one, Carey was back on the Hot 100 – not as an artist, but as the head of her own label, Crave. The first single to be distributed by Crave to chart was “Head Over Heels” by the female R&B group Allure. “I’ve always wanted to help get new artists signed and I feel there’s so much talent out there,” says Carey. “I remember how it felt not knowing anybody, not knowing where to turn, and waiting to get noticed or signed. So Crave is a dream of mine. I’m trying to work with any of the artists who want my input or want help or want to collaborate. And it’s cool for them because I’m a peer. I reached success at an early age and it’s easy to relate to me as a friend, not just a record company person.”

As for the name of the label, Carey isn’t ready to reveal its true origin. “It came from a song I wrote that no one’s ever heard. It’s a secret. One day I’ll talk about it.”

Source:  Mariah Daily; YouTube; MTV.com

• 2 Comments on Behind The #1's ~ Mariah Carey

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• Posted on July 8, 2009 at 4:22 am

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