Mariah Carey had six number one hits to her credit when she went to work on her fourth album, Music Box. Her search for hot producers led to Dave Hall, a Mount Vernon, New York, native who had just finished a project with Mary J Blige. "I loved what Dave was doing at the time," says Carey. "I wanted to do something that had a happy feeling, and that's really not Dave. It's very anti what he's about. So he said, 'Oh, you want to do that happy stuff? All right, all right.' He was not into doing it. Then we listened to a lot of loops and we used the 'Blind Alley' loop and I started singing the melody over it."
Carey explains what the "Blind Alley" loop is: "It's from an old record. That's very low in the mix - you really can't even hear it. It was used on a rap record called 'Ain't No Half-Steppin' by Big Daddy Kane and probably a lot of other things. But it never had this kind of a song over it. We built the song from there and I wrote the lyrics and the melody and Dave ended up liking it."
Hall also liked working with Carey. "My experience with Mariah was a good one. Some artists don't arrive on time and you sit in the studio waiting. But Mariah was always on time, very on point. She's a perfectionist. She knew exactly what she wanted to do when we got in the studio. We would lay down some ideas in the morning and she would go home with it that evening, until the next evening. We would get the hook down that night. She's pretty quick on that."
Hall explains that Carey did not have the title "Dreamlover" when they began working on the song. "The way I usually work is we do an untitled song. We'll grab the hook and we'll use that as the title," he says. Carey adds, "I wrote the verses first. I always do the melody first. Sometimes I'll have an idea for a lyric. If I'm collaborating with someone, I'll direct them in the direction I'm going chordwise, because I get all these melody ideas and then I lose them if I don't have someone really good on keyboards right there with me. That's why I tend to collaborate because I lose the ideas by the time I figure out the chords. All these melody ideas just go."
Tommy Mottola, head of Sony Music Entertainment, as well as Carey's fiance at the time, heard Hall and Carey's take on "Dreamlover" and approached producer Walter Afanasieff about collaborating on the track. "Mariah and Dave did this loop thing and it was new to use pop producers at the time," says Afanasieff. "Their version of 'Dreamlover' was missing a lot of stuff. The spirit of the song was up but it wasn't hitting hard enough." Afanasieff reworked the drums, organ and keyboards. "The organ part and the hi-hat that I changed made it a little bit more swinging and a little bit more driving," says Afanasieff. "It out a whole different shade of colors to it."
"Dreamlover" proved to be Carey's biggest hit to date, topping the Hot 100 for eight weeks. "I love being able to make songs that a lot of people can relate to and a lot of people can sing along to, because tha's what I do," says the artist. "I never go anywhere without the radio on. So I'm glad to be able to do this for a living."
REVIEW:
All Music Guide
By Jose Promis, January 1, 1993
Dreamlover was the first single released from Mariah Carey's 1993 album Music Box, and spent eight weeks at the top of the U.S. charts, making it one of the biggest hits of her career. Carey's CD singles, from the offset, always came equipped with dance and R&B mixes in order to please her wide array of audiences (she has always been a cross-format star, appealing to adult contemporary listeners, urban listeners, dance listeners, and young pop fans). Dreamlover continued that tradition, which began with her 1991 hit single Someday (although it only contains club mixes, as opposed to hip-hop mixes). The song, in its original form, is a light, bubbly pop song, but in its remixed form is transformed into a tribal, dizzying club anthem, infinitely more cutting edge than the original version. For the "Def Club Mix" (the best version on the single), the vocals were re-recorded in order to fit the song's new house beat, turning this tune into a late-night dance epic. Gospel-styled backing vocals were added (featuring future star Kelly Price), as were newly recorded Carey ad-libs that pepper the latter half of the mix. There is also an instrumental, as well as two dub mixes and a tribal mix, which are also more or less instrumentals (except for the tribal mix, which includes Carey's ad-libs). Well-packaged singles such as this easily explain why and how her hits were able to top the charts for such lengthy spans of time.
|
