Mariah Carey Reveals Her Secret Grunge Album From 1995

Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Mariah Carey Reveals Her Secret Grunge Album From 1995

Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Mariah Carey is releasing her memoir, The Meaning Of Mariah Carey, this coming week. Today, she posted a new excerpt from it on Twitter in which she reveals that she made an alternative rock album at the same time she was recording her 1995 album Daydream. “Just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days,” she wrote in the tweet.

“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,” she wrote in the excerpt. “I actually started to love some of the songs. I would fully commit to my character.” She continued:

I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time. You know the ones who seemed to be so carefree with their feelings and their image. They could be angry, angsty, and messy, with old shoes, wrinkled slips, and unruly eyebrows, while every movie I made was so calculated and manicured. I wanted to break free, let loose, and express my misery — but I also wanted to laugh. totally looked forward to doing my alter-ego band sessions after Daydream each night.

Along with the book excerpt, she posted a snippet of one of the songs that she made for the album and she shouts out her friend Clarissa who performed lead vocals with “me as a hidden layer.” The Clarissa in question is Clarissa Dane, who was her roommate at the time the album was recorded. A graphic on the clip points to some artwork for a band called Chick and an album called Someone’s Ugly Daughter.

Some digging reveals that Chick did indeed release an album back in 1995 — the same year that Daydream came out — though it’s not available on streaming services. A couple of songs have been uploaded to YouTube, though, and are copyrighted to Sony/BMG Music Entertainment, part of the same umbrella company that Carey was on at the time.

One of those songs is “Demented,” and the other one is called “Malibu.” They’ve both been on YouTube since 2009 and 2012, respectively, though no one knew of the Carey connection. According to a Carey representative (via Pitchfork), Carey wrote, produced, or provided background vocals for the songs on the Chick album, directed one of their music videos, and art directed the packaging.

You can hear what’s currently available from Chick’s sole album below.

Someone has already sussed out 30-second snippets of each track on the album, which includes a cover of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender,” which is also available elsewhere on the web.

Carey’s memoir comes out on 9/29.

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