Mariah Carey's Upcoming Grunge Album: What We Know

Mariah Carey dropped a bombshell this week that she plans to reissue the secret grunge album she recorded in the 1990s but that's no surprise to her long-time fans, dubbed the Lambily.

Carey recorded the album while making her smash hit fifth album Daydream, amid a period of immense turmoil in both her personal and professional life.

She even credited the album with getting her "through some dark days," in a 2020 tweet.

The singer told the world about the secret album ahead of the release of her autobiography, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, revealing she had been inspired by "breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers."

"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 move I made was so calculated and manicured," she wrote in her memoir.

"I wanted to break free, let loose, and express my misery—but I also wanted to laugh."

Culture and music writer Jeff Ingold is a self-confessed Carey obsessive.

He told Newsweek the singer's foray into grunge is not unexpected because she "has always been on the pulse of new and interesting music."

"I think one of the most underrated aspects of Mariah as an artist is that she's like a musical encyclopedia. And she has such a strong history and understanding of music, and all of its genres," he said.

"It didn't surprise me that she was aware of grunge and rock music at the time… she talks about Hole and Courtney Love and Garbage as being some of her influences."

Ingold suggested Carey also made the album to channel her anger and feel freedom, because at the time she was embroiled in a battle with her record company, Columbia, for more creative control over her music.

"It came at such a difficult time for Mariah, where she felt really trapped and controlled," he said. "It's a piece of music that really feels like it's going to be raw, and gritty and also, I think a bit fun."

Carey had been pushing to move her sound towards more of an R&B and Hip Hop focus but Columbia was hesitant for the record-breaking performer to move away from the ballads that had made her a star.

"Everybody was like 'What, are you crazy?' They're nervous about breaking the formula," she told Entertainment Weekly in 1997. "It works to have me sing a ballad on stage in a long dress with my hair up."

Things came to a head when she insisted on collaborating with Wu Tang Clan's O.D.B for the remix of "Fantasy."

The conflict with Columbia also put pressure on her marriage to Sony boss Tommy Mottola, who had controlled Carey's image and career up until that point.

Sony Music Entertainment is the parent company of Columbia Records.

"From the moment Tommy signed me, he tried to wash the 'urban' (Black) off of me… Just as he did with my appearance, Tommy smoothed out the songs for Sony, trying to make them more general, more 'universal,' more ambiguous," Carey wrote in her autobiography.

"I always felt like he wanted to convert me into what he understood—a 'mainstream' (meaning white) artist."

She also told Oprah Winfrey she felt she had "been treated as an ATM machine with a wig on," during their marriage.

Columbia Records actually ended up releasing the record in the '90s but it was done under the band name Chick.

Carey's friend, Clarissa Dane, sang lead vocals over the "Honey" singer's original recording on the album called Someone's Ugly Daughter.

Carey tweeted in 2020 that she was "on a quest to unearth the version of this album with my lead vocals and will not stop until we find it," because the album had disappeared for almost two decades.

Chick's version only resurfaced on Spotify last year after Carey shone a light on its existence.

But in a recent interview Carey surprised everyone by saying she had not only managed to unearth her recordings, she also planned to release them.

She made the revelation on Rolling Stone's Music Now podcast, and added she was also working on a new Chick project with "another artist," but stopped short of revealing any more information.

Carey's former engineer Dana Jon Chappelle told Rolling Stone the album had been inspired mainly by Green Day's breakout album, Dookie, Sleater-Kinney and the all-woman rock group, L7.

"It was all very spontaneous and impromptu," Chappelle told the magazine in 2020.

Carey wrote in her memoir that she wrote the record by bringing "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," Carey wrote in her memoir.

"I actually started to love some of the songs. I would fully commit to my character."

The question as to why Carey was reissuing this album now was simple for mega-fan, Ingold.

"I think Mariah has a freedom she's never had in her career where I think she feels really in control of who she is, her artistry and her legacy," he told Newsweek.

"And I think she also she really wants the public and particularly more so her fans to know all aspects of what is going on in her life.

"So I think she wants to give us a little treat for sticking with her."