Mariah Carey
Todd Owyoung/NBC
Mariah Carey isn’t keeping her secret grunge album from the Nineties so secret anymore. After SZA played some of the record at a New York City event last week, the singer went on The Tonight Show Monday and spoke openly about the record — even letting Jimmy Fallon play a snippet of a song called “Prom Queen.”
“I do like the cover … and I drew this cover. I didn’t draw the roach. The roach is real,” Carey told Fallon, referring to the album artwork for the unreleased record, titled Someone’s Ugly Daughter.
“I was just rebelling, because I was working on Daydream, and I was doing ‘Always Be My Baby’ and ‘Fantasy,’ and those kinds of songs,” Carey continued. “I loved doing that, but at the end of the night, when the band was still there, I’d say, ‘Can you play, like [a grungy guitar riff]. Play this so I can get out of my head.”
Fallon praised the music as Questlove described the unreleased album as her “best record.” Carey then allowed Fallon to play a snippet of a song titled “Prom Queen” as she explained that she doesn’t think the album is “owned” by any label. “It’s not out, and it has never been released!” Carey said.
On the track, Cary sings with a bit of an accent: “I can be anything that I want to be/Someday I will really show them all.”
Just last week, SZA sat down with Carey for an Apple Music interview in New York City, and played a snippet of another secret song, titled “Hermit,” as SZA gushed about how much she loved it. “I always regretted not putting it out, but they kinda stopped me at that point. Sony at the time … was a little controlling,” Carey explained to Fallon, who begged her to release the music.
Back in 2022, she spoke to Rolling Stone about the album that ended up being released with Clarissa Dane on lead vocals. “This was my outlet and nobody knew about it,” she said at the time. “We were like working for whatever, 15, 16 hours on scrutinizing stuff. And then we just made this record at the same time. I would write the lyrics, go and sing it.”
She added: “There was a fear [from the record company] because some of the lyrical content was not what people were [expecting]. I honestly wanted to put the record out back then under the same pseudonym and just let them discover that it’s me, but that idea was kind of stomped and squashed. So Clarissa came in.”
From Rolling Stone US.
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