Mariah Carey was born March 22, 1970, in New York City. Her mother Patricia named her after the song "They Call The Wind Mariah" from the Lerner and Loewe music Paint Your Wagon. It's unlikely her mother was aware that on the day Mariah was born, the number one song in Britain was "Wand'rin Star" by Lee Marvin - from Paint Your Wagon.
Mariah began singing early, when she was four years old. By six, she was writing poetry. Patricia was a vocal coach, a jazz vocalist and a singer with the New York City Opera, and Mariah's older brother and sister allowed their youngest sibling to listen to their Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin 45s.
When Mariah was 16, her brother paid for her to make a 24-track demo tape at a Manhattan studio. "We needed someone to play the keyboards for a song I had written with a guy named Gavin Christopher," Mariah remembers. "We called someone and he couldn't come, so by accident we stumbled upon Ben (Marguiles). Ben came to the session, and he can't really play keyboards very well - he's really more of a drummer - but after that day, we kept in touch, and we just sort of clicked as writers."
Marguiles had a studio set up at Bedworks, his father's cabinet factory in Chelsea. Mariah was still a high school student when she got together with Ben and wrote their first song, "Here We Go Round Again." "It was this real Motown thing," Ben remembers. "She wrote all the verses out. We were very excited because she sounded incredible. That was the beginning of the collaborating."
Mariah and Ben worked together for a couple of years, as she graduated from high school and supported herself with jobs like waiting tables and checking coats. "The music kept us going," Marguiles explains. "I didn't have much equipment, but we had a way of making demos sound incredible."
A friend of Mariah's who played drums for Brenda K Starr mentioned that a back-up singer had quit, and suggested Mariah audition for the job. "I really didn't want to do it, but I said it's gotta be better than what I'm doing now," Mariah recalls. "So I went to the audition, and Brenda was such a great person." She was not only hired, she became close friends with Brenda.
Back in New York during a break in her tour, Brenda invited Mariah to attend a party thrown by CBS Records. Brenda handed Mariah's demo tape to CBS Records Group president Tommy Mottola, who listened to it in his limo on the way home. After hearing the first two songs, he went back to the party to find the singer. She had already left, and there was no phone number on the tape. Tommy spent the weekend trying to track down Mariah, but Brenda's managers didn't know who she was and he had to wait until Monday. "I got this message that he had called and they wanted me to come to CBS Records, and I was so excited," says Mariah.
Rhett Lawrence, who had produced CBS artists like Johnny Kemp and Earth, Wind, & Fire, was asked to fly to New York and listen to the demo tape. "They described her as a girl who was 18 and had the most incredible voice you've ever heard," Lawrence reports. "I literally got goosebumps on my arms when I heard her sing. I couldn't believe the power and maturity in her voice."
Carey went to Los Angeles to work with Lawrence. He heard a rough version of "Vision of Love," a song Mariah and Ben wrote after she signed with Columbia. Described by Mariah as not so much a love song but a celebration of her life at the time, the demo sounded very different from what would be the finished product; according to Lawrence, "it was a different tempo at the time... a '50s sort of shuffle." Working with Ben and Mariah in the studio, Lawrence changed the tempo and used Mariah's vocals from the demo as a second vocal tag of the song. Released as Mariah's debut single, "Vision of Love" debuted on the Hot 100 the week of June 2, 1990, and was number one nine weeks later.
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