Columbia Records literally stopped the presses for Mariah Carey's "Love Takes Time."
Mariah's debut album for the label was completed and being mastered when she wrote the song with Ben Marguiles. "It was sort of a gospelish thing I was improvising, then we began working on it," Marguiles relates. "It was on a work tape that we had...and we recorded a very quick demo. It was just a piano vocal demo - I played live piano, and she sang it."
Mariah was on a mini-tour of 10 states, playing acoustically with a piano player and three back-up singers. While on a company plane, she played the demo of "Love Takes Time" for Columbia Records president Don Ienner. "All the important guys were on the plane," Marguiles recalls. "(Tommy) Mottola, Ienner, and Bobby Colomby." Mariah was told the song was a "career-maker," and that it had to go on the first album. Mariah protested - her album was already being mastered, and she intended this ballad for her next release.
The demo was sent to producer Walter Afanasieff. Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1958, Afanasieff grew up in San Fancisco. He met producer Narada Michael Walden there in 1981, and first worked with him in the studio on Aretha Franklin's Who's Zoomin' Who album. When Mariah flew west to work with Narada on some tracks for her first album,Tommy Mottola and Don Ienner were impressed with Afanasieff's work and gave him an executive staff producer job with the label.
"I guess to see if he made the right choice, (Tommy) called me up one day," remember Afanasieff. "He said, 'We've got this Mariah Carey album done, but there's a song that she and Ben Marguiles wrote that is phenomenal, and I want to try everything we can to put it on the album.' I said, 'What do you want me to do?' and he said. 'You only have a couple of days, but are you ready to cut it?' I couldn't believe the opportunity that it was. I'd never produced anything by myself up until that time."
The demo was very close to what Mottola wanted the finished product to be, according to Afanasieff. "We cut the song and the music and the basics in about a day - and the only reason is this deadline. It was do it or we were gonna miss out on the whole thing. We got the tape and recorded everything and we got on the plane and went to New York (and) did her vocals. She did all the backgrounds, practically sang all night...We came back to the studio that afternoon, and we had to fix one line very quickly, and then (engineer) Dana (Jon Chapelle) and I got back on the plane with the tape, went back to the studio in Sausalito, and mixed it. So it was a three-day process: a day and a half for music, kind of like a day for vocals, and a day for mixing."
Afanasieff heard from Columbia executives as soon as they received the mix. They wanted Mariah's vocal a little louder, so a remix was quickly completed. The producer asked if the song would still make the debut album, and was told, "We're going to do our best."
When the album was released, "Love Takes Time" was not listed on the cassette or compact disc. "(On) some of the original first copies of the record, they didn't have time to print the name of the song," Marguiles laughs. "And so the song's on there, but it doesn't say that it's on there. It was a song that actually was strong enough to stop the pressing...I don't know if they had to throw away a few hundred copies."
After "Vision Of Love" had a four-week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, Columbia released "Love Takes Time" as a single. It debuted at number 73 (the same position that "Vision Of Love" entered) the week of September 15, 1990, and became Mariah's second consecutive number one hit eight weeks later.
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