Mariah Carey recorded a secret grunge album in the 90s and wants it released

Mariah Carey recorded a secret grunge album in the 90s and wants it released

Pop music icon Mariah Carey once made a secret grunge album called Someone's Ugly Daughter in the 90s, and now she wants the record to see the light of day. On a recent episode of the Las Culturistas podcast, Carey spoke to Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang about the secret album, and said she's upset that the album still hasn't been released. “I’m so mad I haven’t done that yet."

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In 2020, her memoir The Meaning Of Mariah Carey revealed that she had recorded the album when she was making her smash hit album Daydream in 1995. After her recording sessions for the songs on Daydream, she would record songs for Someone's Ugly Daughter.

"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," she said.

Carey never got the album released because her record label, Sony Music, was against the idea and felt it would damage her image. Carey pitched the idea to Sony Music to release the album under a band named "Chick" and have people naturally come to find out she was singing, but the idea never came to fruition. Carey made the album to express her creative freedom from Sony Music at the time, where she apparently found little of while working on Daydream.

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"I created an alter-ego artist and her Ziggy Stardust-like spoof band. My character was a dark-haired brooding Goth girl who wrote and sang ridiculous tortured songs," Carey said. "It was irreverent, raw, and urgent, and the band got into it. I actually started to love some of the songs. I would fully commit to my character."

The record did end up releasing in some capacity however. Carey's friend and former roommate Clarissa Dane worked on the album with her. After the label told Carey she couldn't release the project, they came to a compromise where Dane re-recorded the vocals and became the new lead vocalist, with Carey being a backup singer.

Album art

The album is apparently hard to find, and Carey said she's been looking for the original version with her lead vocals since 2022, but hasn't found any luck, but Carey is hopeful that one day the world will hear her original vision for the project. "You'll hear it," she said.

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