Photo Credit: WBLS / CC by 3.0
Mariah Carey is planning to release an alternative rock album recorded in the 90s.
In a podcast interview with Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt, Mariah Carey hinted at plans to release her recently unearthed alt-rock album, Someone’s Ugly Daughter, recorded in 1995. Lost for years, the album features Carey’s lead vocals, as opposed to the version that initially saw the light of day, which was overlaid was replacement vocals. Carey indicates that she intends to release not only her version of Someone’s Ugly Daughter but a related project with another artist.
In 1995, Someone’s Ugly Daughter was released with replacement vocals under the band name Chick. Columbia Records, Carey’s label, kept her involvement a secret and buried the original. Even without her lead vocals, the Chick version of the album featured her backing vocals and was still produced by Carey. All of the tracks, except for a cover of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender,” were also co-written by Mariah Carey.
When Hiatt asked how her search was going for the long-buried version of Someone’s Ugly Daughter, Carey replied, “we actually have it.”
“(The unearthed version) will become something we should hear, but also, I’m working on a version where there will be another artist working with me,” she teases in the interview. “Possibly something built around the album.”
“This was my outlet, and nobody knew about it,” Carey says. “I honestly wanted to put the record out back then, let them discover that it was me, but that idea was squashed.”
“Of course, there was the Courtney Love era of Hole going on at the time. I even did the artwork — it was a dead roach and some lipstick,” Carey says with a laugh, likening the album to “a girls’ Green Day group moment.”
Meanwhile, the Songbird Supreme’s most well-known hit, “All I Want for Christmas is You,” has been topping the Billboard Hot 100 chart each year since 2019. The song is her 19th number one hit overall, giving her just one fewer than the Beatles.