Mariah Carey Secretly Made and Released an Alternative Album in the 90s and It Kind of Rocks

I have to level with you; I’m not actually a huge fan of Mariah Carey. She has a fantastic voice but the things she chooses to sing with that voice are all just terrible to me. In the 90s, when she was at the peak of her popularity, I was the weird kid that actually listened to all the bands the normal people who listened to Mariah Carey and The Backstreet Boys at the time now claim to have listened to, like Sonic Youth and The Breeders.

But it turns out that while Mariah Carey was recording her 1995 best-seller Daydream she recorded a secret album with her band to unwind and that album is actually good and was under our noses the whole time.

Carey posted a clip of one of the songs on Twitter accompanying an excerpt from her new book about how she had a kind of envy for alt-rockers like Kim Deal or Kim Gordon who had a very different image than Carey had as a pop singer. Carey is the background singer on this track.

Fun fact: I did an alternative album while I was making Daydream 👀 Just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days. Here's a little of what I wrote about it in #TheMeaningOfMariahCarey 🤟 S/O to my friend Clarissa who performs the lead w/ me as a hidden layer #Chick #TMOMC pic.twitter.com/Re23t5whcd

— Mariah Carey (@MariahCarey) September 27, 2020

I am not joking when I say that is literally the best Mariah Carey song I’ve heard in my entire life, and if I had I had known about this at the time I probably would have had pictures of her in my locker in high school instead of Juliana Hatfield and PJ Harvey. Okay, maybe not, this isn’t ‘C’mon Billy’ but it’s still really good. The album is out of print and not on streaming services but a few songs are on YouTube, including that one

Of course, there’s a lot more money to be made in radio-friendly pop music than there is distorted, lo-fi alt-rock, so Daydream sold over 20 million copies while Pixies’ Doolittle, their best-selling album with their biggest crossover hit ‘Here Comes Your Man’, sold about 1.5 million copies.

This is basically the reverse of Liz Phair’s sell-out 2003 self-titled album; Carey is a pop star who released an alt-rock album called Someone’s Ugly Daughter under the band name Chick, their only album, that flew entirely under under the radar. Seriously, I had never heard of this and I had albums by Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Murmurs and Luscious Jackson. I have a whole new respect for Mariah.