The story of Mariah Carey

A lonely girl on Long Island

Mariah Carey was born on the twenty seventh of March 1969 in Huntington, on Long Island, New York. Her mother Patricia was a former opera singer and vocal coach of Irish descent. Her father, Alfred Roy Carey, was an aeronautical engineer with African American and Afro Venezuelan roots. Mariah was named after a song called They Call the Wind Maria, from the Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon. She was the youngest of three children, after her sister Alison and her brother Morgan. Patricia's family disowned her for marrying a Black man, and the Careys never found peace with their neighbours. In Huntington, someone poisoned the family dog and set fire to their car.[1] [2]

Her parents divorced when Mariah was about three. Alison went to live with their father, while Mariah and Morgan stayed with their mother, and Mariah saw little of her dad from then on. She spent long hours at home alone, and she started singing at the age of three, copying her mother's practice of Verdi's Rigoletto in Italian. Patricia gave her vocal training but never pushed her toward opera. Mariah later said she respected opera enormously, but it was not what moved her. Gospel was, especially the Clark Sisters, along with soul singers like Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Al Green, and above all Minnie Riperton, whose high notes set her chasing the whistle register.[1] [2]

In her 2020 memoir, Mariah described a childhood far darker than her public image suggested. She wrote about violent fights between her brother Morgan and their parents, and about being called a racial slur by a group of white girls. The hardest chapter is about her sister Alison, who was eight years older. Mariah wrote that when she was twelve, Alison drugged her with Valium, offered her cocaine, left her alone with an older boyfriend who forced a kiss on her, and burned her back with boiling tea, leaving third degree burns. Mariah calls her an ex sister. Both Alison and Morgan later sued her over the book and denied her accounts.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, Mariah wrote poetry and lyrics and often skipped class to work as a demo singer. On the Long Island scene she met a drummer and songwriter named Ben Margulies, and the pair wrote songs in his father's old studio, building a demo tape that included an early version of Vision of Love. She graduated in 1987, moved to Manhattan and shared a one bedroom flat with four other young women. To pay the rent she worked part time jobs and even completed five hundred hours of beauty school. Then she landed a job singing backing vocals for the freestyle singer Brenda K. Starr, and that job changed everything.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tape in the limousine

In December 1988, Brenda K. Starr took her nineteen year old backing singer to a record industry party in New York. Mariah handed her demo tape to Tommy Mottola, the head of CBS Records, soon to be Sony Music. The story goes that he played it in his car on the way home, told the driver to turn around, and found that she had already left. It took him days of searching through Starr's people to track her down. He signed her to Columbia that month and hired top producers like Ric Wake, Narada Michael Walden and Rhett Lawrence to polish her songs. Mottola wanted a young star to rival Whitney Houston, and he believed he had found one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Columbia spent more than a million dollars launching her. Her first big public moment came on the fifth of June 1990, when she sang America the Beautiful at the NBA Finals, ending on a whistle note that made the broadcaster declare that the palace had a queen. Her debut single, Vision of Love, co written with Ben Margulies, went to number one and set a new bar for vocal runs in pop. The New Yorker later called it the Magna Carta of melisma. Her self titled debut album spent eleven weeks at the top of the Billboard 200, and at the Grammys in February 1991 she won Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.[1] [2] [3]

Love Takes Time, Someday and I Don't Wanna Cry all followed Vision of Love to number one, and the debut sold around fifteen million copies worldwide. Her second album, Emotions, came out in September 1991. She made it with Walter Afanasieff and the C and C Music Factory team of Robert Clivillés and David Cole, and even wrote one song with Carole King. The title track became her fifth straight number one, making her the first artist whose first five singles all topped the Hot 100. Behind the scenes, though, her partnership with Ben Margulies had ended in a dispute over songwriting royalties, and he took legal action against Sony.[1] [2] [3]

Mariah did not tour for Emotions. She blamed stage fright and the difficulty of her songs, but people started whispering that she was a studio creation who could not sing like that live. It was not long after the Milli Vanilli lip sync scandal, and doubts spread fast. So on the sixteenth of March 1992, she recorded an intimate seven song set for MTV Unplugged at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. Days before the show, she and Afanasieff added the Jackson 5 song I'll Be There to the set. It became her sixth number one, the special aired again and again, and the whispers stopped.[1] [2]

Sing Sing, Hero and a Christmas song

Mariah and Tommy Mottola had been dating since she was recording her first album. He was about twenty years older and ran the company that released her records. They married on the fifth of June 1993 at Saint Thomas Church in New York, in a ceremony said to have cost half a million dollars. The couple moved into a huge custom built mansion on a fifty one acre estate in Bedford, New York. Mariah later nicknamed it Sing Sing, after the maximum security prison, because that is how living there felt. In her memoir she described security cameras, intercoms and guards who followed her whenever she left the house.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Her third album, Music Box, arrived in August 1993, built with Walter Afanasieff for maximum pop appeal. Critics were lukewarm, but the public was not. Dreamlover and Hero went to number one in America, and her cover of the Badfinger song Without You gave her a first number one in Britain, Germany and Sweden. Music Box went on to sell more than twenty eight million copies, her biggest album ever. Hero has an unusual origin. Mariah and Afanasieff wrote it in about two hours for Gloria Estefan to sing in a 1992 film called Hero. Mottola heard it and insisted Mariah keep it, so she rewrote some lines around memories of her grandmother.[1] [2] [3]

Christmas albums were usually made by stars whose careers were fading, so the team hesitated. Mottola pushed anyway. In the summer of 1994, Mariah and Afanasieff wrote three originals, and the last was meant to sound like a Phil Spector rock and roll Christmas record from the sixties. That song became All I Want for Christmas Is You. Mariah decorated the studio for the session in August. Released in late October 1994, it was only a modest hit at first, partly because it was not sold as a commercial single in America. Nobody knew that it would become a Christmas standard, earning an estimated hundred million dollars in royalties by 2023.[1] [2] [3]

With Daydream in 1995 she pushed toward R and B and hip hop. She built the lead single Fantasy around a sample of Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love, and directed the video herself, rollerblading through an amusement park in Rye, New York. Fantasy became the first single by a woman to debut at number one on the Hot 100. For the remix, she wanted Ol' Dirty Bastard of the Wu Tang Clan. Sony thought he was crazy, and Mottola hated it, but it helped start the pop and rap pairings that later took over the charts. Then came One Sweet Day with Boyz II Men, which spent a record sixteen weeks at number one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

One Sweet Day was about loss. Nathan Morris of Boyz II Men had been writing a similar song for the group's late tour manager, and Mariah widened her lyrics to speak to people losing loved ones to AIDS. Her sister Alison had been diagnosed with HIV in 1988. At the Grammys in February 1996, Daydream was up for six awards and won none. At the same time, Mariah was secretly recording something very different. Late at night after Daydream sessions, she made a grunge style album with friends under the band name Chick. Sony only released it with her friend Clarissa Dane singing on top, and her part stayed secret until 2020.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Butterfly and breaking free

By the mid nineties, Mariah felt that her music and her life were both controlled by her husband. The escape began with a baseball player. At a dinner, which he later admitted he had arranged, she met the young New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. In her memoir she described calling him in whispers from her assistant's house because she was so afraid of Mottola. She later called Jeter the catalyst for leaving her marriage. She also wrote that as it fell apart, Mottola slowly dragged a butter knife down her face in front of his staff. The couple separated in December 1996, announced it in May 1997, and divorced in March 1998.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Butterfly, released on the tenth of September 1997, was the sound of that freedom. She brought in Sean Combs, Q Tip and Missy Elliott, sang in a softer, breathier style, and wrote more openly about her own life than ever before. The Honey video showed a sexier Mariah, half dressed and leaping from a balcony into a pool, and fans read it as a message about her marriage. Honey and My All both reached number one, giving her more chart toppers than any other woman. She later said The Roof was a literal account of a rooftop kiss with Jeter. Critics rate Butterfly among her very best albums, and she has called it the first time she felt truly free.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In April 1998 she joined Aretha Franklin, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Gloria Estefan and Carole King for VH1 Divas Live. Later that year Sony asked for a greatest hits album, and Number Ones sold over a million copies in its first week in Japan alone. It included a duet with Whitney Houston, When You Believe, from The Prince of Egypt. The press loved to paint the two singers as rivals, but they performed it together at the Oscars. At the 1998 MTV awards they even wore matching dresses and tore them away together to reveal different outfits, poking fun at the whole idea. Number Ones also included a cover of Brenda K. Starr's I Still Believe, as a thank you.[1] [2] [3] [4]

She still owed Sony one more album, and she wanted out of the company her ex husband still ran. She finished Rainbow in about three months in 1999, for the first time without Walter Afanasieff, working with Jay Z, Snoop Dogg, Missy Elliott, David Foster and Diane Warren. Heartbreaker and Thank God I Found You both went to number one. When Sony pushed an upbeat single instead of her ballad Can't Take That Away, she posted messages on her website asking fans to request it on radio. Around this time she began a relationship with the Mexican superstar Luis Miguel that lasted until 2001. Billboard named her its Artist of the Decade for the nineties.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Glitter and the fall

In April 2001 Mariah signed with Virgin Records for a reported eighty million dollars, one of the biggest record deals ever. Her first project there was Glitter, a film about a young singer in the early eighties, with a soundtrack to match. For its lead single Loverboy, she built the hook on Firecracker, a 1978 track by Yellow Magic Orchestra. Then that same sample turned up on I'm Real, a song by Jennifer Lopez, who was signed to Mottola's company. The publisher said Mariah's team had asked for it first. She had to rebuild Loverboy around a Cameo song. In her memoir she accused Mottola of sabotage.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

That July her life came apart in public. On the nineteenth of July 2001 she arrived on the MTV show Total Request Live pushing an ice cream cart, wearing a big man's shirt, and began a striptease in front of a bewildered Carson Daly. Days later she posted strange messages and voice notes on her website. On the twenty sixth of July she was admitted to hospital with what her publicist called a physical and emotional breakdown. She stayed under medical care in Connecticut for about two weeks. The publicist firmly denied tabloid reports of a suicide attempt. Years later Mariah revealed she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Glitter soundtrack was released on the eleventh of September 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks. The film followed ten days later and flopped, taking about five million dollars worldwide against a twenty two million dollar budget. Mariah won a Golden Raspberry award for worst actress. Loverboy stalled at number two, ending her run of number one singles in eleven straight years. In January 2002 Virgin's parent company EMI paid her about twenty eight million dollars to end the contract, and her lawyers even threatened to sue over EMI's use of the word terminated. Years later her fans rallied behind the soundtrack, pushing it to the top of iTunes in 2018.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

She rebuilt quietly. After leaving hospital, she spent months in Capri, Italy, writing new songs. She signed with Island Def Jam for a deal worth more than twenty four million dollars and launched her own imprint, MonarC. In 2002 her father Alfred Roy, whom she had barely known growing up, fell ill with cancer. She went home to be with him before he died, and wrote Sunflowers for Alfred Roy in his memory. That same year she sang The Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl thirty six. Her album Charmbracelet came out in December 2002. It sold moderately, and several critics said her voice was damaged.[1] [2] [3]

Charmbracelet also carried the opening shot in one of pop's strangest feuds. In 2002 Eminem began suggesting in songs and interviews that he and Mariah had been romantically involved, while saying he did not like her as a person. Mariah answered with a song called Clown, making it clear that, in her telling, the two of them had never been intimate at all. On tour she even had a dancer dress up in a Detroit basketball jersey and a blond wig. Around the same time, asked about Jennifer Lopez on German television, she replied that she did not know her. That little shrug later became one of the internet's first great memes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Emancipation of Mimi

By 2005 many critics had written her off. Then came The Emancipation of Mimi. She made it with Jermaine Dupri, the Neptunes and Kanye West, and called it a party record. The second single, We Belong Together, went to number one and stayed there for fourteen weeks. It was the biggest song of 2005, and Billboard later named it the song of the decade, making her the only artist to earn that title twice. In September 2005 she became the first woman to hold the top two spots on the Hot 100 at once, with Shake It Off at number two.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Emancipation of Mimi was the best selling album of 2005 in America, with almost five million copies, and it sold around twelve million worldwide. It earned her eight Grammy nominations in 2006, and she won three, including Best Contemporary R and B Album. That night her performance of We Belong Together and Fly Like a Bird brought the only standing ovation of the evening. A reissue gave her another number one, Don't Forget About Us. In 2005 she had also sung at Live 8 in London and at a telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Then she went back on the road with The Adventures of Mimi, her first headlining tour in three years.[1] [2] [3]

In April 2008, Touch My Body became her eighteenth number one. By Billboard's count that put her ahead of Elvis Presley for the most number ones by a solo artist, with only the Beatles still ahead. Its video, directed by Brett Ratner, starred Jack McBrayer of 30 Rock, who at first thought the offer was a prank. Her album E equals MC squared then opened with four hundred and sixty three thousand copies, her best first week ever. On the thirtieth of April 2008, after a whirlwind romance, she married the actor and comedian Nick Cannon in the Bahamas. Later that year she suffered a miscarriage, and a planned world tour was cancelled.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On New Year's Eve 2008 she sang four songs at a private party on the island of Saint Barts. The hosts were the family of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and she was reportedly paid a million dollars. When the uprising in Libya broke out in 2011, she said she felt horrible and embarrassed, that she had been naive about who had booked her, and pledged that royalties from a future song would go to human rights causes. On happier nights, in January 2009 she sang Hero at an inaugural ball for Barack Obama, and in July she sang I'll Be There with Trey Lorenz at Michael Jackson's memorial service.[1] [2] [3]

Later in 2009 she surprised everyone as an actor. In Lee Daniels's film Precious, she played a drab but caring social worker, looking unrecognisable under harsh fluorescent light, breaking what Daniels called Mariah rules. Critics praised the performance, and she won a breakthrough award at the Palm Springs festival. Her twelfth album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, came out that September. Its lead single, Obsessed, mocked a man who kept claiming a relationship that she said never existed. In the video she played the stalker herself, in a goatee and baggy clothes. Everyone assumed it was aimed at Eminem, and he answered with a furious diss track called The Warning.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Twins, Idol and a very cold New Year

In November 2010 she released a second holiday album, Merry Christmas II You. One track was a duet with her mother Patricia, a sign that the relationship, though difficult, had not been cut off. On the thirtieth of April 2011, exactly three years after her wedding, she gave birth by caesarean section to fraternal twins, Moroccan and Monroe. She later said her daughter Monroe was one of the reasons she eventually wrote her memoir. In 2013 she joined American Idol as a judge for a reported eighteen million dollars. The season is remembered for her clashes with fellow judge Nicki Minaj, captured in a video that leaked to the gossip site TMZ.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Her fourteenth album went through years of delays and a change of title, and finally came out in May 2014 as Me. I Am Mariah, The Elusive Chanteuse. The first half of that title came from a self portrait she drew as a little girl. That August, Nick Cannon confirmed they had separated. He filed for divorce in December 2014, and it was finalised in 2016. That December she began her annual Christmas shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York, a tradition that turned into a yearly holiday tour. In 2015 she started a residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[1] [2] [3]

In 2015 she began dating the Australian billionaire James Packer. They announced their engagement in January 2016, with a thirty five carat diamond ring, but by October it was over. Reports claimed she sought a huge settlement, and she later sold the ring. In October 2016 she began dating her backing dancer Bryan Tanaka, who became her creative director, and in the video for her 2017 single I Don't, she set fire to a wedding dress. Her seven year relationship with Tanaka ended in December 2023. Her life in this period was filmed for an E reality series, Mariah's World, which followed her Sweet Sweet Fantasy tour and her wedding plans, and premiered in December 2016.[1] [2] [3]

On New Year's Eve 2016, Mariah performed live in Times Square for Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. It went wrong almost at once. She said she could not hear the music through her earpiece, and the set collapsed on live television amid claims that she had been miming. The New York Times called it a train wreck, and it was replayed around the world. Her camp said the producers had set her up to fail. The production side said her equipment worked and that she had skipped rehearsal. Exactly a year later she returned to the same stage and got it right, in what was widely called a redemption.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Caution, Christmas and the memoir

In April 2018, Mariah told People magazine that she had bipolar two disorder. She had first been diagnosed in 2001, around her breakdown, but said she had lived in denial and in constant fear that someone would expose her. For years she thought she simply had a severe sleep disorder. Now she was in therapy and taking medication, and she said she hoped to help lift the stigma. That summer she opened a new Las Vegas residency, The Butterfly Returns. In November 2018 she released Caution, her fifteenth studio album, and it drew some of the warmest reviews of her whole career.[1] [2] [3]

All I Want for Christmas Is You kept growing every December, driven by streaming. On the chart dated the twenty first of December 2019, twenty five years after its release, it finally reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. That made it her nineteenth number one, and it was still on top in January 2020, so she became the first artist to reach number one in four separate decades. It went on to spend a total of twenty two weeks at number one. In 2023 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. Every year since 2019, she has posted a video at midnight on the first of November announcing that it is time.[1] [2] [3]

In September 2020 she published The Meaning of Mariah Carey, written with Michaela Angela Davis. It went straight to number one on the New York Times best seller list, and critics praised its wit and candour. The book told of her childhood, her marriage to Mottola, the Glitter year and the secret Chick album. Not everyone in it was pleased. In February 2021 her sister Alison sued for at least one point two five million dollars for emotional distress, disputing the book's claims. In March her brother Morgan sued for defamation, saying a fight she described between him and their father never happened. Mottola, in his own memoir, had apologised for being controlling.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

There were other legal fights. In 2021 her company tried to trademark the title Queen of Christmas. The singers Darlene Love and Elizabeth Chan objected, and in November 2022 the trademark board rejected the application. In 2022 a songwriter named Andy Stone sued her, claiming she had profited from the title of his own 1989 song with the same name. He dropped the case, then filed it again in 2023. Meanwhile she co produced the Broadway musical Some Like It Hot, which earned her a Tony nomination. In late August 2024 she announced that her mother Patricia and her sister Alison had died on the same day. She said her heart was broken.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Here for it all

In March 2025 a judge in Los Angeles ruled for Mariah in the Christmas song lawsuit, finding the two songs were not substantially similar, and ordered sanctions against the other side for frivolous arguments. That August she finally headlined Brighton Pride in England, five years after the pandemic cancelled her first booking. She wore a pink jacket with the slogan Protect the Dolls, in support of transgender women, and it later sold at auction for more than four thousand pounds for the charity GLAAD. In September, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Ariana Grande presented her with the Video Vanguard Award. Amazingly, it was her first ever VMA.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twenty sixth of September 2025 she released her sixteenth studio album, Here for It All, her first after decades on major labels, put out independently through the company gamma. It featured Anderson .Paak, Shenseea and Kehlani, and the gospel group the Clark Sisters, her childhood heroes. It entered the Billboard 200 at number seven, her nineteenth top ten album, and topped the album sales and R and B charts. It made her only the third woman with new top ten albums in four decades, after Madonna and Shania Twain. The lead single, Type Dangerous, won her Best R and B Video at the VMAs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2026 she was honoured as MusiCares Person of the Year, for her work with Camp Mariah, a summer camp for city kids she has supported since the nineties, and for disaster relief. At the gala, Foo Fighters played songs from her secret Chick album with Taylor Momsen singing, and she said it was one of the best things she had ever experienced. On the sixth of February 2026 she sang Volare in Italian at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics at San Siro in Milan. Organisers admitted parts had been pre recorded as a precaution, but would not say whether she sang live. She was not paid.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

As of 2026, Mariah Carey has sold more than two hundred and twenty million records. She has nineteen number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, more than any other solo artist, and has spent a record one hundred and one weeks at the top. She has won five Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Rolling Stone ranked her the fifth greatest singer of all time. Her fans call themselves the Lambily. She has been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three years running, and she keeps promising to release the Chick album with her own voice on it.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey and Tommy Mottola. The Sony boss who signed her at nineteen became her husband in 1993. He shaped her early sound and image and made her a global star. She later described their Bedford mansion as a prison, with cameras and guards watching her. They separated in 1996 and divorced in 1998. In his 2013 memoir he admitted he had been obsessive and apologised if he seemed controlling, while arguing it was part of her success.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff. The Brazilian born producer was her main songwriting partner from Emotions through Butterfly. Together they wrote Hero, One Sweet Day, My All and All I Want for Christmas Is You, with Afanasieff often programming every instrument himself. He even played drums on her secret Chick album. Rainbow in 1999 was her first album without him, as she moved deeper into hip hop.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mariah Carey and Ben Margulies. A drummer she met by chance on Long Island in the late eighties, Margulies wrote her demo songs with her in his father's studio. Seven of their songs made her debut album, including the number ones Vision of Love, Love Takes Time and Someday. Their partnership ended after a dispute over songwriting royalties, and he took legal action against Sony.[1] [2] [3]

Mariah Carey and Derek Jeter. She met the young Yankees star while still married to Mottola, and they began a secret friendship conducted in whispered phone calls. She says he was the catalyst for her leaving her marriage. The songs The Roof, My All and Honey were inspired by him, and Crybaby drew on their break up. They dated from 1997 to 1998.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mariah Carey and Luis Miguel. She dated the Mexican singer from 1998 to 2001, through the Rainbow years and into the run up to Glitter. She said at the time that they were happy despite the media, but later wrote of cultural gaps between them. Their romance was dramatised in Luis Miguel: The Series, with Jade Ewen playing Mariah.[1] [2]

Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon. The actor and comedian appeared with her in the Bye Bye video, and they married in the Bahamas on the thirtieth of April 2008 after a short romance. Their twins, Moroccan and Monroe, were born on their third anniversary in 2011. They separated in 2014, divorced in 2016 and remain co parents. During their marriage Eminem mocked them both in The Warning.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Mariah Carey and Eminem. Their feud began in 2002, when Eminem claimed they had been involved and she flatly denied it. She answered him with Clown and later Obsessed, playing him in a goatee in its video. He replied with The Warning in 2009. It became one of the most talked about feuds of the decade, and she left him out of her memoir entirely.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez. The two were pitted against each other after Lopez began working with Mottola in 1998, and the Firecracker sample row in 2001 made it personal. Asked about Lopez on German television in 2003, Mariah said she did not know her, and the line became a famous meme. In her memoir she still refers to her as another female entertainer whom she does not know.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. The media framed them as rival divas from 1990 onward. In reality they recorded When You Believe together in 1998, sang it at the Oscars, and joked about the rivalry at the MTV awards. Mariah remembered Whitney as funny and warm, and after Whitney's death in 2012 she called the song a testament to sisterhood.[1] [2]

Mariah Carey and Patricia Carey. Her mother, a former opera singer, trained her voice and was the first to recognise her talent. Their relationship was deeply complicated, and in her memoir Mariah described feeling neglected and wrote of setting boundaries. Yet they recorded a duet for Merry Christmas II You in 2010, and Mariah spent the last week of Patricia's life with her before she died in August 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Mariah Carey and Brenda K. Starr. The freestyle singer hired a teenage Mariah as a backing vocalist, fed her, brought her clothes and took her to the party where she met Tommy Mottola. Mariah called her a big sister figure, and in 1998 she covered Starr's I Still Believe on her greatest hits album as a thank you.[1] [2] [3]

Mariah Carey and Jermaine Dupri. The Atlanta producer first worked with her on Daydream in 1995, beginning a partnership that lasted until 2014. He was central to The Emancipation of Mimi, including We Belong Together. In her memoir she wrote that Mottola's security once held him at gunpoint in her home while she and Da Brat slipped out for fries.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Mariah Carey

• Mariah was named after They Call the Wind Maria, a song from the Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon. The song comes from the 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon. Her unusual name has been one of her trademarks ever since, and she pronounces it with a long i sound.[1]
• Her surname was adopted by her Venezuelan grandfather, Roberto Núñez, after he emigrated to New York. Carey was not the family's original name. Her grandfather took it on when he settled in America, and her father Alfred Roy Carey inherited it.[1]
• She completed five hundred hours of beauty school while trying to break into music in Manhattan. After moving to the city she shared a one bedroom flat with four roommates, worked part time jobs and trained in beauty school while pushing her demo tape.[1]
• Mariah cannot read sheet music. She writes by humming melodies and working with a pianist, and says that approach frees her to try unusual melodies and chord changes. She had piano lessons at six but composes by ear.[1]
• She says she has had nodules on her vocal cords since childhood. Mariah claims the nodules help her reach higher notes than most singers, but they also make her voice sensitive to tiredness and lack of sleep.[1]
• Her first big public moment was singing America the Beautiful at the 1990 NBA Finals. On the fifth of June 1990 she ended the song with a whistle note, prompting the CBS broadcaster Pat O'Brien to declare that the palace now had a queen.[1]
• Hero was written for Gloria Estefan to sing in a 1992 film, not for Mariah. She and Walter Afanasieff wrote it in about two hours for the film Hero. Tommy Mottola insisted she keep it, and it became one of her signature songs.[1] [2]
• She gave the proceeds of a 1993 Madison Square Garden performance of Hero to victims of a shooting. On the tenth of December 1993, the money went to the families of victims of the Long Island Rail Road shooting, which had happened days earlier.[1]
• Fantasy's video was her debut as a director. Unhappy with earlier videos, she directed Fantasy alone, filming herself rollerblading through Playland amusement park in Rye, New York.[1]
• Mariah secretly made a grunge album in 1995 under the band name Chick. She recorded Someone's Ugly Daughter late at night during the Daydream sessions, inspired partly by Green Day's Dookie. Walter Afanasieff played drums, and her role stayed secret until 2020.[1] [2]
• Foo Fighters played songs from her secret Chick album at a gala in her honour in 2026. At the MusiCares Person of the Year event in January 2026, Foo Fighters performed Chick songs with Taylor Momsen. Mariah called it one of the best things she had ever experienced.[1]
• The Roof samples Mobb Deep because that song was playing as she drove home from her first date with Derek Jeter. She calls The Roof her first complete docu song, meaning it describes exactly what happened on a rooftop with Jeter while she was still married.[1]
• The Notorious B.I.G. was meant to appear on the Honey remix but died before recording it. Mariah was wary because he had mentioned her in a crude song, but a phone call arranged by Sean Combs won her over. After his death, Mase and the Lox took the spot.[1]
• Her greatest hits album sold over a million copies in its first week in Japan. Number Ones made her the only international artist to do that. It sold more than three million copies there in three months, a record for a non Asian artist.[1]
• The Heartbreaker video cost more than two and a half million dollars. Directed by Brett Ratner, it featured Mariah fighting her own brunette alter ego, Bianca Storm, in a cinema bathroom. Jay Z could not appear at first because of contract issues.[1] [2]
• She is credited with starting the low rise jeans trend by cutting the waistband off her jeans. It happened on the set of the Heartbreaker video in 1999. Vogue called her quintessential to the trend, although some credit the designer Alexander McQueen.[1]
• Aretha Franklin refused to rehearse with her at Divas Live because of the air conditioning. Mariah wrote that Aretha would not sing with the air conditioning on, so the two went on without rehearsing their duet of Chain of Fools.[1]
• Mariah says Mottola's guards once held Jermaine Dupri at gunpoint in her home. In her memoir she wrote that she and Da Brat slipped out for fries, and security searched the house with guns drawn, questioning a shaken Dupri in the studio.[1]
• She sang Sunflowers for Alfred Roy, the song for her late father, only once in the studio. Written after her father died of cancer in 2002, the Charmbracelet track was so emotional that she recorded it in a single take.[1]
• After her 2001 breakdown she spent five months in Capri, Italy, writing new songs. The sessions there became the foundation of her 2002 album Charmbracelet, her first for Island Def Jam and her own label MonarC.[1]
• EMI paid about twenty eight million dollars to end her Virgin contract, and her lawyers objected to one word. They threatened to sue because EMI said it had terminated the deal rather than cancelled it, as agreed. EMI threatened to countersue.[1] [2]
• Jack McBrayer thought the offer to star in the Touch My Body video was a prank. The 30 Rock actor only believed it after director Brett Ratner phoned him personally. The video won Best Comedic Video at the 2008 BET Awards.[1]
• Her 2009 cover of I Want to Know What Love Is spent twenty seven weeks at number one in Brazil. The Foreigner cover became the longest running number one in the history of the Brasil Hot 100.[1]
• The title Me. I Am Mariah came from a self portrait she drew as a little girl. The drawing, with that caption, appears on the album's back cover. The album was first due as The Art of Letting Go.[1]
• Her mother sang a Christmas duet with her in 2010. Patricia Carey, the former opera singer, recorded O Come All Ye Faithful with the Hallelujah Chorus with Mariah for Merry Christmas II You.[1] [2]
• All I Want for Christmas Is You took twenty five years to reach number one in America. It topped the Hot 100 in December 2019. Because it stayed there into January 2020, Mariah became the first artist to top the chart in four separate decades.[1]
• Her company's bid to trademark Queen of Christmas also covered dog accessories. Filed through her company Lotion, the applications sought Queen of Christmas, Princess Christmas and QOC for goods from fragrances to pet gear. It was rejected in 2022.[1]
• Britney Spears said Mariah was an early user of ring lights. Britney recalled seeing one when she met Mariah backstage at an awards show in 1999. Mariah is famously particular about lighting and dislikes overhead light.[1]
• She calls the left side of her face her bad side because of a photographer's comment when she was nineteen. At her first photo shoot, she was told to be shot only from the right, and she has been wary of her left side ever since.[1]
• She was not paid for singing at the 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. The ceremony's director said no performer was paid, as that was the condition for taking part. Mariah sang Volare in Italian at San Siro in Milan.[1]
• She is the youngest MusiCares Person of the Year since Sting in 2004. Billboard noted that she was also the youngest woman to receive the honour since Gloria Estefan in 1994.[1]
• Her pink Protect the Dolls jacket from Brighton Pride sold for four thousand one hundred pounds. The jacket was auctioned for GLAAD, even with stains and missing rhinestones listed in the description. She wore it in support of transgender women.[1]
• Her first ever MTV Video Music Award came in 2025, thirty four years after she first performed on the show. She won Best R and B for Type Dangerous and the Video Vanguard Award on the same night, and joked about what had taken them so long.[1] [2]
• Before 2008, she had topped the British singles chart only twice, both times with cover songs. Without You reached number one in 1994 and Against All Odds with Westlife in 2000. All I Want for Christmas Is You later gave her a third.[1] [2]
• She celebrates anniversaries instead of birthdays and famously refuses to acknowledge the passing of time. In her memoir she explains that living outside of time helps her protect her inner child, and she often says she is eternally twelve.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.