1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. EMOTIONS
Mariah Carey made chart history when "Emotions" went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. She became the first artist to have her first five singles all make number one, breaking the record of four established by the Jackson Five 21 years earlier.

"Emotions," the title track from her second album, was one of four songs on the disc co-produced by the team of David Cole and Robert Clivilles, who had recently visited the top of the chart on their own as C & C Music Factory.

Cole credited CBS Records Group president Tommy Mottola for suggesting the collaboration with Mariah. "Working with Mariah was, first of all, fun," he exclaimed. "Robert and I bounced off ideas. We came up with a whole bunch of grooves. If this worked, cool, if this doesn't work, next. And that's how we did the whole project. We would all come together and decide on what worked and what didn't.

"What was funny was both Robert and Mariah came up with the 'Emotions' groove separately. She had an idea for it and so did Robert. They both had mentioned doing something similar to the (group) Emotions. I mean, the Emotions were an inspiration for the song 'Emotions,' there's no way to deny that or get around it. It definitely has the feeling from the Emotions, but we're not dumb enough to go and steal the damn record."

According to Cole, it was Mariah who came up with the song's title. "We thought maybe that's a bit much. And we all decided, 'No, why not?' There's nothing wrong with calling it 'Emotions'...it's a great name for a song."

The first song Cole and Clivilles worked on with Carey was "You're So Cold," which was being considered for the album's first single until they came up with "Emotions."

Cole talked about Mariah's octave range. "The high stuff? Oh, that's what she's known for. We had to include it, but as we started working, we decided we didn't want to use it as much as we could have. We didn't want it to become a gimmick instead of the fact that she could sing. But it's amazing. Listen to the very end of the song: she's hitting this very low note, and you compare that to the high note she hits. She's got an incredible range."

"Emotions" was Mariah's highest debut yet, leaping on to the Hot 100 at number 35 the week of August 31, 1991. Six weeks later, it was number one, where it remained for three weeks. For a follow-up, Columbia released "Can't Let Go," written and produced by Mariah and Walter Afanasieff.

"Mariah and I started writing together for the album a few months before starting to record," says Afanasieff. "I was doing Michael Bolton's album. And during the time that Michael would do a small little tour or take a break over the holidays, I would have the opportunity to write with Mariah." Soon they had a large collection of songs which they played for Columbia executives to see which ones should be recorded. "Can't Let Go," one of the first songs they had written, made the cut.

6. 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."

7. DREAMLOVER
Mariah Carey had six number one hits to her credit when she went to work on her fourth album, Music Box. Her search for hot producers led to Dave Hall, a Mount Vernon, New York, native who had just finished a project with Mary J Blige. "I loved what Dave was doing at the time," says Carey. "I wanted to do something that had a happy feeling, and that's really not Dave. It's very anti what he's about. So he said, 'Oh, you want to do that happy stuff? All right, all right.' He was not into doing it. Then we listened to a lot of loops and we used the 'Blind Alley' loop and I started singing the melody over it."

Carey explains what the "Blind Alley" loop is: "It's from an old record. That's very low in the mix - you really can't even hear it. It was used on a rap record called 'Ain't No Half-Steppin' by Big Daddy Kane and probably a lot of other things. But it never had this kind of a song over it. We built the song from there and I wrote the lyrics and the melody and Dave ended up liking it."

Hall also liked working with Carey. "My experience with Mariah was a good one. Some artists don't arrive on time and you sit in the studio waiting. But Mariah was always on time, very on point. She's a perfectionist. She knew exactly what she wanted to do when we got in the studio. We would lay down some ideas in the morning and she would go home with it that evening, until the next evening. We would get the hook down that night. She's pretty quick on that."

Hall explains that Carey did not have the title "Dreamlover" when they began working on the song. "The way I usually work is we do an untitled song. We'll grab the hook and we'll use that as the title," he says. Carey adds, "I wrote the verses first. I always do the melody first. Sometimes I'll have an idea for a lyric. If I'm collaborating with someone, I'll direct them in the direction I'm going chordwise, because I get all these melody ideas and then I lose them if I don't have someone really good on keyboards right there with me. That's why I tend to collaborate because I lose the ideas by the time I figure out the chords. All these melody ideas just go."

Tommy Mottola, head of Sony Music Entertainment, as well as Carey's fiance at the time, heard Hall and Carey's take on "Dreamlover" and approached producer Walter Afanasieff about collaborating on the track. "Mariah and Dave did this loop thing and it was new to use pop producers at the time," says Afanasieff. "Their version of 'Dreamlover' was missing a lot of stuff. The spirit of the song was up but it wasn't hitting hard enough." Afanasieff reworked the drums, organ and keyboards. "The organ part and the hi-hat that I changed made it a little bit more swinging and a little bit more driving," says Afanasieff. "It out a whole different shade of colors to it."

"Dreamlover" proved to be Carey's biggest hit to date, topping the Hot 100 for eight weeks. "I love being able to make songs that a lot of people can relate to and a lot of people can sing along to, because tha's what I do," says the artist. "I never go anywhere without the radio on. So I'm glad to be able to do this for a living."

8. 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."

9. FANTASY
I had the melody idea for 'Fantasy' and then I was listening to the radio and heard 'Genius of Love,' and I hadn't heard it in a long time," recalls Mariah Carey. "It reminded me of growing up and listening to the radio and the feeling that song gave me seemed to go with the melody and the basic idea I had for 'Fantasy.' I initially told Dave Hall about the idea and we did it." Issued as a single in 1982, "Genius of Love" by Talking Heads spin-off group Tom Tom Club peaked at number 32 on the Hot 100. "We called up the Tom Tom Club and they were really into it," says Mariah of her first single off the Daydream album.

Dave Hall, who also collaborated with Carey on "Dreamlover," recalls that "Fantasy" was "a fun song to do. Mariah brought me 'Genius of Love' and I laid some strings on it and put it to a groove that I felt would really fit her. And that song didn't take us but a minute to do, because she really busted that out within two days. We did a rough copy and let (Sony Music Entertainment CEO) Tommy Mottola hear it and he loved it, so all we had to do was bring it back in and mix it down."

The Daydream album reflected Mariah's love of hip-hop music. She took that influence one step further with "Fantasy," asking Sean "Puffy" Combs to helm a remix that emphasized the bass line more than the original pop version. Carey also invited Ol' Dirty Bastard from the Wu-Tang Clan to add some rap to the track.

"Fantasy" was an important step in Carey's career, and not just because the single was the second ever to debut at number one on the Hot 100, following Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone," and the first by a female artist. The video for "Fantasy" marked Carey's debut as a video director. "I've done a lot of videos and wasn't always a hundred percent thrilled," she explains. "For the most part, I was never thrilled with the results, so I figured I would give it a shot." Carey earned high marks for this end result, which featured her Rollerblading in tight shorts, and a clown tied to a pole.

Three weeks after "Fantasy" entered the Hot 100 in pole position, the Daydream album repeated that feat on the Billboard 200. It was the first time that an artist had debuted at number one with an album and that album's first single. But more importantly for Carey, the experience of recording her sixth album was far different from making the first one. "I feel it's a lot easier now," she says. "When I think back to the first album, I wasn't used to the process of working with other people and producers, and I had a different role to play. I was like the guest of the producer in the studio, a kid that had a deal and was hoping to have some success. And now I feel more confident and more in control, because I am. I go in and do what I want. I sing by myself and if the co-producer chooses to come in at the end and give me some critique, that's fine and I'm really open to that. But I feel more free doing it the way I've been doing it for the past couple of albums."

10. 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."

11. 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."

12. HONEY
Mariah Carey is a huge fan of hip-hop, according to Sean "Puffy" Combs, founder of Bad Boy Entertainment, who was asked by the artist to produce a couple of tracks for her Butterfly album. "She and [rapper] Q-Tip [of A Tribe Called Quest] had an idea and they asked me to come in and produce the record," says Combs. But his need for excellence kept him out of the one place you'd expect to find him. "A lot of people feel I'm overbearing, so I wasn't allowed in the studio when she did her vocals," he reveals. "I'm trying to work on that. I'm such a perfectionist, sometimes I don't give people the chance to breathe. So I've been banned from a lot of studios. Mariah [recorded "Honey"] until she thought it was perfect, like a hundred times. She gave me a hundred tracks to choose from."

Released as the first single from Butterfly, "Honey" was an instant hit, debuting at number one on the Hot 100. It was the sixth single to do so, and the third by Carey after "Fantasy" and "One Sweet Day." No other artist at this point in time had had even two singles debut at the top of the chart. "Honey" was also the single that broke Carey away from the pack. After "Always Be My Baby," she was in a three-way tie with Madonna and Whitney Houston as the solo female artist with the most number one singles on the Hot 100. All three women had collected 11 chart-topping hits, but "Honey" put Carey out in front with 12. It also put her in a tie for fourth place with the Supremes among all artists for the most number one singles, behind the Beatles (20), Elvis Presley (17), and Michael Jackson (13). And it made her label, Columbia, the first to amass 80 number one hits in the rock era.

"Honey" also added impressive chart statistics to Combs' resume. Along with Stevie J., it was his third consecutive number one on the Hot 100. It was only the third time in the rock era that a producer or production team had three chart-toppers in a row. George Martin gave the Beatles a hat trick in 1964 with "I Want To Hold Your Hand," "She Loves You," and "Can't Buy Me Love." And in 1978, Barry Gibb, Andy Galuten and Karl Richardson were the producers of "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees, "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water" by Andy Gibb and "Night Fever" by the Bee Gees. Sean and Stevie were responsible for producing "I'll Be Missing You," "Mo' Money Mo' Problems" and "Honey." The trio of hits gave the producers another first: they were number one for the whole summer of 1997. No other producer or producers had ever been responsible for the top song on the Hot 100 for an entire season of the year.

On a more personal note, "Honey" was Carey's first single after the June, 1997 separation from her husband Tommy Mottola, the president and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment. The track, like the rest of Butterfly, revealed a more confident, mature and openly sensual woman than had been heard on previous albums. "I've come into my own as an artist," Carey told Elysa Garder in the Los Angeles Times. "At this point I feel free enough to express what I'm really feeling, without using a smoke screen...It's definitely an evolution for me." That evolution included a change of manager and attorney, and an exploration into acting in films and television for the 27-year-old superstar.

13. 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."

14. HEARTBREAKER
Rainbow was Mariah Carey's final studio album of original material for Columbia, her label home since her debut in 1990. "In all honesty, it was like I have one more album here and I want to move on, because my personal life had changed. It was difficult for me to still be in the system, but it was a great outlet for me to be ablt to go into the studio and write a song like 'Petals,' which is one of my most personal songs and remains one of my favorites. I think [it has the most] honest lyrics I've ever written."

"'Petals' wasn't a single." The label led with "Heartbreaker," produced by Carey with a friend she met through mutual acquaintences, DJ Clue. "He came up with the Stacey Lattisaw 'Attack of the Name Game' loop because he felt it was very much in my vein, like those happy kind of records. And when he came up with the 'It Ain't No Fun,' the remix, that's when I knew it was over. That's when I said this is the hottest record I've ever done, in terms of a club record. That and 'Fantasy' with Ol' Dirty Bastard, because you can still go to clubs and hear them play that 'Heartbreaker' remix with Missy [Elliott] and [Da] Brat. I love collaborating with Clue." Carey is also effusive about her "Heartbreaker" partner, Jay-Z. "It's fun when you find people you can relate to and that you respect. Jay-Z is someone I so admire as a writer and as an artist. We could be sitting in the studio and he could freestyle a rhyme that would be incredible just off the top of his head. He doesn't need pen and paper. I equate that to a singer who can pick up the mike and riff and ad-lib over a song and take you to a totally new place."

Carey recounts her inspiration for the "Heartbreaker" lyrics: "It was from the standpoint of girls who keep going back to that same guy and they can't help themselves. They know they're going to get hurt. I've been one of those girls, so I know there's a lot of them out there."

Providing backing vocals on "Heartbreaker" was someone Carey had known for a long time. Trey Lorenz was the male voice on her remake of the Jackson 5's "I'll Be There." "He's an amazing writer and singer," says Carey. "He's so influenced by old school stuff, yet he's so current. He's known me since before my first album, and he's a great, loyal friend."

There's a party atmosphere on the original version of "Heartbreaker" on the Rainbow album. But there wasn't a big crowd in the studio. "It's me, Clue, and Jay-Z, and whatever other producer things Clue put in," says Carey. "Being a DJ, he has a lot of different ideas for making atmospheric stuff on mix tapes."

"Heartbreaker" was Carey's 14th number one on the Hot 100, a total run up in just over nine years. With "Heartbreaker," she sailed past Michael Jackson's 13 chart-toppers to claim third place among artists with the most number ones. Only the Beatles (with 20) and Elvis Presley (with 17) had more than Carey, and she wasn't finished with the pole position.

15. THANK GOD I FOUND YOU
What impressed producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis most when they worked with Mariah Carey for the first time was that she knew exactly what she wanted, and she had intimate knowledge of their previous work. "She knew our catalog upside down," says Jimmy Jam. "She knew everything about us and what we'd done. She had written a song with Diane Warren called 'Can't Take That Away,' and she said, 'You know how on the song "Again" you did the strings that sound like this and on "On Bended Knee" you did a drum program that sounded like this.' She could paint a total picture for us as to what she wanted the finished record to sound like."

Jam and Lewis didn't have a pre-conceived notion of what they wanted from Carey. "It wasn't like Janet [Jackson], where we all grew up together. Mariah had done her own thing and had been very involved with the arranging and production of her records, so we respected that and said, 'What can we do for you?' She would fly into town for five or six hours. We'd crank out a couple of songs. She'd get on a plane and fly to whatever was the next thing she was doing."

One night Jam and Lewis were at a Timberwolves game when they received a call from Carey's assistant, who told them she had an idea for a song and was arriving in Minneapolis at midnight. They met her at the studio at the appointed time. "She's got 'Thank God I found you' and that's about as much as she's got," Jam remembers. "She sang the melody. We usually have Big Jim Wright sit in on those kind of sessions to work out chords. He wasn't there so I had to work out the chords myself. So I'm playing and there was a part where I said, 'Man, what chord am I supposed to do here?' and Mariah has such a good ear, she sang me the chord."

Carey has a similar memory of that midnight session. "We just like sitting in a studio vibing off each other. 'Thank God I Found You' was a love song inspired by a relationship I was in at the time. I sang it to Jimmy and Terry and we put the song together from there. They have been so inspirational to me throughout my life. Growing up, I listened to so many songs they have written which are classics."

At that late-night session, Jam and Lewis knew Mariah wanted male singers to join her on the track. "Our first choice when we wrote the song was K-Ci and JoJo. They were on a different record label and there were a lot of problems getting clearance for them to do it. We booked studio time and kept saying to them, 'Just come in and sing it. You could nail it in an hour. We'll worry about the politics later.'" It never happened. "So we thought about voices that would work with the song. Joe was a known entity in R&B; but nowhere near the star he is now. From what we knew about Joe, he was a nice guy who would be there for the video and performances. That becomes important when you do duets, and his label was willing." Joe was flattered to be asked. "When she called me to come to the studio," says Joe, "I had no idea I would record at that moment, but I couldn't let the opportunity slip away. She sat in the control room while I was singing in the booth and it was amazing to have her sit there and watch her smile and be in her zone."

Jam and Lewis also wanted male harmonies on the track, and recruited the four members of 98 Degrees. "They had to do their part quickly and to this day the guys say, 'Sorry about the vocal.' But they came in and killed it. And Joe killed it. We always thought he had so much talent and should be bigger than he is. It was really a stepping stone for him to go and do what he's done."

16. WE BELONG TOGETHER
Sessions that produced 'We Belong Together' - Mariah's 16th #1 single - almost didn't happen.

Mariah needed a miracle.

In November 2004 she was still mired in a deep slump that was on the verge of killing her career ("Glitter," anyone?). But she had a full album's worth of hot new material in the can that she was sure would rocket her.

However, Mariah's label boss, L.A. Reid, thought she needed a little insurance, and suggested she try just one more session to sprinkle some final fairy dust on her emancipation proclamation, The Emancipation of Mimi. "L.A. was like, 'You and Jermaine Dupri make magic together, why aren't you in the studio with him?' " Carey recalled. "I said, 'I love Jermaine, is he free? I know he's doing a million things, Usher and this and that.' But Jermaine said, 'Come on down.' "

Dupri, of course, is one of the biggest hitmakers of the past 20 years, having crafted hits for Usher, TLC, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Nelly, Aaliyah, Kris Kross and many others in addition to Mariah. When she arrived at Dupri's studio in Atlanta the next day, the two of them worked nonstop, popping off two songs in two days: "Get Your Number" and "Shake It Off."

Up to that point, Carey and Reid had planned to make "Say Somethin'," a collaboration with Snoop Dogg and Pharrell Williams, her new album's first single. But once Reid heard the Dupri-helmed songs, Carey recalled, "He was like, 'Oh no! Now we've got to change the single, make these singles one and two.' "

Carey agreed. "Nobody could tell me that 'Shake It Off' wasn't going to be my first single. It was my favorite song, just from the demo."

Dupri had quickly sized up what he felt the album needed. "The records that I made are very melodic records, regardless of their hip-hop influence," Dupri said. "I think that's what she was missing."

And since he and Mariah had come up with those two songs in two days, why stop? "Then it was like, 'You want to go back down to Atlanta again?' " she said. So the pair teamed up again, coming up with "It's Like That" and "We Belong Together" — the first two songs in the album's final sequence — in two days. "We said, OK, we love 'Shake It Off,' " Carey recalled. "We don't know how we're going to top that, but let's just try.' It turned out that 'It's Like That' was the right fire-starter, and 'We Belong Together' was the bigger record." "We Belong Together" became Carey's sweet 16: her 16th #1 hit, the most ever by a female artist.

Dupri may deserve as much credit for what he got Mariah not to do. For someone so associated with multi-octave vocal gymnastics (look up "melisma" in the dictionary and you'll see a picture of Mariah), Carey is a model of restraint on "We Belong Together": She doesn't even raise her voice until the song is near its end. She sings the chorus as if she actually were resigned to not having what she wants, and that understated approach makes the song far more powerful than it would have been if she'd belted it.

"People have to learn the art of subtlety," she said. "We realized that once we did it, it was an inspiration in terms of how I was singing it. It was obvious that if it was touching us, it was going reach other people too."

Carey also reversed her usual technique of singing as many notes per syllable as she possibly can, and her comparatively spare, hip-hop-inspired delivery is what pushes the song forward (the instrumental backing is primarily a beat and just a few simple piano chords).

"We just went back and forth with concepts for the beat and melodic ideas, which I didn't expect from Jermaine, because usually I'm the one that dictates the entire melody," Carey said. "But he had some really great ideas."

The rest of the song is classic heartbreak. For the second verse, Mariah said she and Jermaine "had a pow-wow," trying to figure out what it makes certain songs so special, how they "just hit you, and you're like, 'Oh, man!' You know?"

They came up with Bobby Womack's "If You Think You're Lonely Now" and Babyface's "Two Occasions," which Carey quotes in "We Belong Together" as she flips across a radio dial: "I gotta change the station/ So I turn the dial, tryin' to catch a break/ And then I hear Babyface/ I only think of you and it's breaking my heart/ I'm trying to keep it together but I'm falling apart."

Carey reverses the melancholy at the end with vocal lifts that imply she's bound to get her heart's desire anyway, through sheer determination.

Kind of like the way she's revived her career.

"It's like, damn, two years ago she was the craziest person in the funny farm, and that [image] don't even exist no more," Dupri said. "And she never got nominated this many times when she was the Mariah of old. It felt like the rebirth of the person you know as Mariah Carey." "I am so grateful I went to Atlanta," Carey said. "And I have to say, we wrote some of my favorite songs on the album. I'm so proud of Jermaine - he's so focused, and he knew what had to be done.

"You can never write off talent," she added. Especially not her own.

17. DON'T FORGET ABOUT US - currently not available.


Source:
The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits 2003, 5th Edition, Fred Bronson
Thanks to Jason!

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