Mariah Carey will reissue her Secret ’90s Grunge Album with restored lead vocals

Mariah Carey’s 2020 memoir The Meaning Of Mariah Carey included all sorts of wild revelations, but none of them was weirder than the news, previously kept under wraps, that Mariah had recorded and released an entire secret grunge album in 1995. While working on her blockbuster album Daydream, Carey and her band also blew off steam by writing and recording an album of fuzzed-up alt-pop. Mariah’s friend and former roommate Clarissa Dane then re-recorded Mariah’s lead vocals, and Sony/BMG released the album as Someone’s Ugly Daughter, the sole LP from a band known as Chick. It largely disappeared without a traceand Mariah Carey’s involvement wasn’t public knowledge for 25 years.

Naturally, the news of a ’90s Mariah Carey grunge-pop album got people all excited. Mariah’s former engineer Dana Jon Chappelle gave an interview to Rolling Stone claiming the the album had been inspired by Sleater-Kinney, L7, and especially Green Day’s Dookie. Mariah, meanwhile, tweeted 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.” Apparently, that quest has been completed, and we will soon get to hear the restored Chick album, with actual Mariah Carey lead vocals. (In the version that came out, Mariah sang uncredited backups.)

In conjunction with the 25th anniversary album Butterfly, Mariah Carey recently gave an interview to Rolling Stone‘s Music Now podcast, and one of the subjects that came up in that conversation was the Chick album. Mariah says that she’s found the original version of the album, with her own lead vocals, and that she’s planning to release it. Mariah also says that the Chick project might not be done; she’s planning on doing some new mysterious thing with the Chick project and “another artist.”

Source: stereogum.com