Mariah Carey, the singer-songwriter who hid a grunge band inside her pop empire

Mariah Carey

Photo: Shawn Miller / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 27, 1969 Huntington, New York, United States
Occupation	Singer-songwriter and record producer
Known for	The Lego Batman Movie, The Prince of Egypt, The Butler
Awards	5 Grammy · Songwriters Hall of Fame · MTV Video Music Award · TIME Person of the Year

The video opens a few minutes before midnight on Halloween, in a New York club, with Mariah Carey in punk clothes tearing through Hermit and then throwing herself into the mosh pit to crowd-surf. When the clock turns, the rock singer is gone and the whistle note that opens the holiday season takes over: “It’s time.” The joke only lands if you know the song. Hermit belongs to Chick, an alternative-rock band whose album Carey wrote, produced and sang on in secret at the height of her fame, while her own label refused to release it with her voice up front.

That double life is the most useful way into Carey. No solo artist has collected more number ones on the Billboard Hot 100, and she co-wrote eighteen of her nineteen. Yet the public version of her is a voice and a Christmas song, and she has spent decades reminding people that she writes her own material. “They see this diva; they see hair, makeup, body, and clothes,” she once said. “They don’t think songwriter.” This year the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame passed her over for a third straight time, and the chart record her holiday standard held went to a country song. Her sales are beyond argument; her standing as an artist is not.

The material came from a hard childhood on Long Island. The youngest of three children, Carey grew up in Huntington, New York, where she was born on March 27, 1969, to Patricia Hickey, a former opera singer and vocal coach of Irish descent, and Alfred Roy Carey, an aeronautical engineer of African-American and Afro-Venezuelan lineage. Neighbours of the mixed-race family poisoned the family dog and set fire to the car. After her parents divorced she stayed with her mother and saw little of her father. In high school she was already writing lyrics and skipping classes to sing on demo sessions.

In Manhattan she sang backup for the freestyle singer Brenda K. Starr, and at an industry party in December 1988 she handed a demo tape to Tommy Mottola, the head of Columbia Records. The debut, Mariah Carey, spent eleven weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and won her the Grammys for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, the latter for Vision of Love. Her first five singles all reached No. 1, a feat no other artist has matched. An MTV Unplugged set in 1992 answered critics who called her a studio creation.

She married Mottola in 1993, and the records of that marriage were the biggest of her career. Music Box sold more than 28 million copies worldwide. Merry Christmas, released in 1994, carried All I Want for Christmas Is You, which she wrote with Walter Afanasieff. On Daydream, in 1995, she took more control: the Fantasy remix with Ol’ Dirty Bastard is credited with turning the pop-rap pairing into a standard format, and One Sweet Day, with Boyz II Men, held No. 1 for 16 weeks. At the Grammys the following February she had six nominations and went home with nothing. “I will never be disappointed again,” she said.

The same months produced the secret. While recording Daydream, Carey wrote, produced and sang on Someone’s Ugly Daughter, released in September 1995 under the band name Chick. Columbia would not put the album out with her lead vocals, so her friend Clarissa Dane became the face of the project and Dane’s voice was layered over Carey’s. She separated from Mottola at the end of 1996, and the albums that followed sound like a release from supervision: Butterfly (1997), made with Sean Combs and Missy Elliott, is her best-reviewed record.

The collapse that followed is the part the Christmas mythology tends to smooth over. Carey left Columbia in 2001 for an $80 million deal with Virgin, then suffered a breakdown that July and was hospitalised. The film Glitter and its soundtrack were savaged; the album came out on September 11, 2001, and Loverboy stalled at No. 2, ending a run of eleven consecutive years with a US No. 1. Reviewing Charmbracelet in 2002, AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that “Mariah’s voice is shot.” In 2018 she disclosed that she had been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder in 2001. There are less sympathetic chapters too: a 2008 New Year’s Eve concert for the family of Muammar Gaddafi, which she later said left her feeling “horrible and embarrassed”, and the lip-sync accusations that have trailed her since a disastrous Times Square broadcast on New Year’s Eve 2016.

The recovery came through the songs. The Emancipation of Mimi was 2005’s best-selling album in the United States, and We Belong Together spent 14 weeks at No. 1 and became Billboard’s song of the decade. She took home three Grammys in 2006. Her screen work earned respect when she played a social worker in Lee Daniels’s Precious in 2009. She married Nick Cannon in 2008; their twins, Moroccan and Monroe, were born in 2011, and the divorce was finalised in 2016.

The Christmas song was the slowest of her hits. All I Want for Christmas Is You did not top the Hot 100 until December 2019, a quarter of a century after its release, and went on to log 22 weeks at No. 1, then the longest reign in the chart’s history. This year Ella Langley‘s Choosin’ Texas overtook it as the longest-running No. 1 ever. Carey still holds the records for most No. 1s by a solo artist, with 19, and most weeks at the top, with 101.

Her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, written with Michaela Angela Davis, reached No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list and finally told the Chick story. Here for It All, her 16th studio album, arrived on September 26, 2025 on her own imprint with Gamma and debuted at No. 7. The video for its lead single, Type Dangerous, won her a first MTV Video Music Award on the same night she received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. In January 2026 MusiCares named her its Person of the Year, and at the gala Foo Fighters played Chick songs including Someone’s Ugly Daughter. A week later she sang Volare and her own Nothing Is Impossible at the opening ceremony of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. The Rock Hall, which had nominated her for the third consecutive year, left her out of the class announced in April.

The Glitter soundtrack, the great flop of 2001, returned on October 30 in a 25th-anniversary edition, its first vinyl pressing since the original release. Her Christmas show leaves North America this month for the first time since 2018, with dates in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, then Birmingham on November 27, London’s O2 on November 30, Manchester on December 2 and Malta on December 8. No 17th album has been announced. The open question is whether the songwriter, and the rock singer she once hid behind a pseudonym, will ever get equal billing with the Queen of Christmas, or whether the season will keep deciding who she is.

Selected Discography

• Mariah Carey (1990)
• Emotions (1991)
• Music Box (1993)
• Merry Christmas (1994)
• Daydream (1995)
• Butterfly (1997)
• Rainbow (1999)
• The Emancipation of Mimi (2005)
• E=MC² (2008)
• Merry Christmas II You (2010)
• Me. I Am Mariah…The Elusive Chanteuse (2014)
• Here for It All (2025)

Tags: singers, pop, Ella Langley, Mariah Carey, All I Want for Christmas Is You, Boyz II Men

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