Mariah Carey on pop stardom, the Grammys and her annual holiday tour

By Mikael WoodPop Music Critic

Oct. 30, 2024 3 AM PT

In August of 1994, Mariah Carey created a Christmas music classic on her very first try.

The singer and songwriter with the Olympic-athlete-level voice was already a Grammy-winning superstar when she reluctantly took her record label’s suggestion to make a holiday album. But she’d never written a Christmas song until she and her collaborator Walter Afanasieff cranked one out over the course of a summer afternoon: a cheery, uptempo number driven by jingling sleigh bells, lush girl-group vocal harmonies and an inhumanly speedy keyboard lick.

Thirty Christmases later, it’s almost impossible to imagine the yuletide season without hearing “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which has more than 1.8 billion streams on Spotify and has spawned a second career for Carey, 55, as the self-appointed Queen of Christmas. She’s released a children’s book and an animated film based on the song; she’s sold Christmas tree ornaments and beanies and pajama sets. And for the past decade she’s staged an annual live holiday spectacular, either on the road or in her hometown of New York City.

This year’s tour, which launches Nov. 6 at the Yaamava Theater in Highland and will stop Nov. 8 at the Hollywood Bowl, comes accompanied by a 30th-anniversary deluxe reissue of Carey’s “Merry Christmas” LP and arrives as she begins her yearly push to get “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100. In 2020, the singer — who shares 13-year-old twins with her ex-husband, TV host Nick Cannon — published an acclaimed memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” in which she wrote frankly about her tumultuous marriage to former Sony Music boss Tommy Mottola and revealed that she’d secretly dropped an alternative-rock album under the name Chick in 1995.

Ahead of the appearance of her annual post-Halloween “It’s time” video — her signal to fans that it’s OK to break out the Christmas music — Carey sat down for an interview at a rented Bel-Air mansion fully decked out for a BBC holiday special. Actually, she reclined for the interview, slipping off her heels and stretching out on a leather chaise under a waffle-weave blanket that she eventually cast aside with a grimace.

“This is a little dank,” she said.

I caught last year’s Christmas tour at the Hollywood Bowl. At one point you discovered some moisture onstage and asked a crew member to bring out a mop. Then you took the mop and improvised a song about it.
The mop was a moment. I didn’t know what was gonna happen — whatever it was, it was stream of consciousness. It really was wet on the stage, and I was scared, and so I made up that little song. Now I’m sitting here like, Oh, what am I gonna do this year…? But you can’t plan that. Those mop moments are few and far between.

You also said last year that your agent had convinced you to put some non-holiday songs in the show.
I’m keeping with that because I guess everybody expects it now. I wouldn’t mind just doing Christmas songs.

There’s a purity to that approach.
To me there is. But I was listening to the set yesterday and it was sounding good.

After “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” what’s the second-best song on the “Merry Christmas” album?
There’s a song called “Miss You Most (At Christmas Time).” It’s a tough one. Someone once told me — actually, it was my late mother — that it was the saddest Christmas song ever.

It’s OK, in your view, for Christmas music to be sad.
Think about “Blue Christmas.” Some people are always in a funk around the holidays — not everybody’s all festive, running around in the snow like other people we know [laughs]. You know what song is pretty sad to me? “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”

The “if” does a lot of emotional work in that lyric: “War is over if you want it.”
That’s why I get sad when I hear it.

Do you feel like you have the leeway in your show to give a sad Christmas performance?
I don’t. People are there for the most part to be uplifted, and it’s my job to try my hardest to be uplifting. If I want to be sad, I’ll go home and watch whatever show is going to make me sad.

“All I Want” has made it to No. 1 every year since 2019. Do you feel now like it’s something that has to happen?
I don’t think of things that way. I can’t sit there and go, This has to happen.

From all my reading about the song —
Can I re-answer that?

Please.
It’s happened so many times that I’m thrilled. And should it happen again, I would be even more thrilled [laughs].

Mariah Carey performs at the Hollywood Bowl in 2023.

My understanding of the song’s history is that you were purposely going for something timeless.
With the production, yes. I guess I was thinking when I was writing it to have it be timeless, too. I wanted it to feel like a modern classic.

You still like it?
I do. That’s why the whole “Not yet” and “It’s time” thing happened, is because I don’t listen to Christmas music until it’s actually the season to do that.

Seems worth pointing out that this year’s tour starts a full three weeks before Thanksgiving.
What are they doing to me?

As you know, you’re famous for not acknowledging the passage of time.
Mm-hmm.

Yet this new “Merry Christmas” reissue draws attention to the fact that it’s been 30 years since it came out.
Well, the milestones of songs and albums having anniversaries and things of that nature — that’s all good. I just don’t have them myself.

Are the people in your life allowed to wish you happy birthday?
Oh, they know better than that. They’ve learned to wish me a happy anniversary. It’s an anniversary.

You recently marked another anniversary — 20 years of 2005’s “The Emancipation of Mimi” — on the Billboard Music Awards.
You mean the American Music Awards.

My mistake. So many awards shows —
So little time. Which we don’t acknowledge.

What makes an awards-show moment fun?
If I like the outfit I wore. I liked that outfit.

Another accolade was your nomination this year for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I wondered if you had thoughts on that.
My thoughts are: I didn’t get in.

I was trying to be delicate.
Everybody was calling me going, “I think you’re getting in!” and so I was excited about it. But then it didn’t happen. My lawyer [Allen Grubman] got into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame before me.

How about the Grammys?
[Sighs]

Oh, the sigh.
Because I don’t know how to answer this question. They gave me two Grammys when I first started out. Then one year — huge year for me, career-wise — I had like six nominations with the “Daydream” album and “One Sweet Day” and “Always Be My Baby” and “Fantasy.” All those songs in a row ended up being so big that you just thought, OK, at least “One Sweet Day” is gonna win best duet or something. Then I sat there the whole time and I didn’t get anything. I was like, This is not fun. But what can I do? Be a sore loser and say, “F the Grammys?” Whatever. If they give me more Grammys, I’ll like them more.

I went back and rewatched your episode of “MTV Unplugged” from 1992. The interplay between you and your background singers —
The Price sisters and Melonie Daniels.

It’s astounding.
We worked together a lot — we’d rehearsed and we’d gone overseas by the time of that “Unplugged” show. I mean, technically that was my third album, although they didn’t count it as an album. We love Sony, but back then…

You’re saying the record company didn’t count the “Unplugged” record against your contract.
Can you believe that? And “I’ll Be There” was a No. 1 song.

The music business, folks.
Welcome to it. Anyway, yes, there is a connection that we had. Ever since I started and was a backup singer myself, I’ve revered those girls that are so incredible but still don’t have a record deal or anything.

Well, there are singers and then there are stars, right?
That’s a very record-company thing to say. I don’t know. What’s that movie called? “500 Miles from Stardom”?

Slightly closer: “20 Feet from Stardom.”
I guess that’s kind of what we’re talking about.

You ever surprise yourself with your own voice?
That happened on my first album, on this song called “All In Your Mind.” I’m doing a high note at the end, and then two notes came out at once. I left it on the record.

What’s an album of yours where you’d say you nailed what you were trying to do?
Either “Butterfly” or “The Emancipation of Mimi.” I put both of those in a good place, which is mainly because of where I was in my life at the time. They’re happy records, although the lyrics might be a little bit on the sad side — a little on the crying-out-from-your-heart side.

“Butterfly” features “Honey,” which you made with Sean “Diddy” Combs. Do the recent allegations against him taint your experience of that song?
That’s hard not to happen when stuff goes on and you hear somebody’s voice on a record. You’re like, Hmmm. It’s weird, you know? But honestly, “Honey” was more a representation of me than anybody else, and I know that. The other people that were involved — or maybe the other person that we’re talking about — wasn’t really that involved.

OK, last few things. Word is, you’re working on new music. Accurate?
Accurate. I have nine or 10 songs, so it’s enough to have an album. I just haven’t put the vocals down on every song.

When you make a new record, are you looking to be pushed or challenged by your collaborators?
Sometimes. But I have to have a connection to the song right away.

Random point, but I’ve always loved your song “#Beautiful” with Miguel.
That was a lot of Miguel [laughs].

Mariah Carey puts "Butterfly" and "The Emancipation of Mimi" among her best albums.

What’s the status of the Chick album? The people are clamoring for you to put it on streaming services.
I want to release it — I just have to figure out how.

This feels like a solvable problem.
I know, but I want it to be right. To me, it’s like one of the best things I’ve done.

And what about the TV biopic Lee Daniels is making about you?
The status of that is that I’m still waiting for him to send me the first script. Hopefully he can hurry up and get it done. He keeps telling me he’s going to.

Will it be hard for you to let someone else tell your story?
Well, it’s based on my book, so I don’t feel nervous about it. And the amount of control that I have with it is strong.

The book felt very honest. Looking back at it, are there things you left out that you wish you hadn’t?
Some things are just too much. But there are some things in the book that I wish weren’t in the book. Not that they were wrong or that they were inaccurate. But you learn later: Oh, I shouldn’t have done that.

Because it hurt people in your life?
Because it potentially hurt people in my life. I don’t know, because I don’t talk to certain people in my life.

This has been an interesting year for young female musicians talking openly about the harsh reality of pop stardom. The impression your book leaves is that you didn’t feel free to speak about it when you were starting out.
I didn’t feel very free at all because I was also married at that time and it was a difficult situation. So I had to wait for my freedom to be able to say, “This is kind of f—ed.”

What’s it been like to watch Chappell Roan express herself the way she has?
For me, it’s like that time is in the past, and somebody else can do with their time what they want.

You’re not consumed with resentment that it was different for you.
There was a lot of resentment back then. But not anymore.