Graphics by Drew Litowitz, photos by Ke.Mazur/WireImage
When Mariah Carey released her memoir, it came with infinite revelations. An instant New York Times bestseller, The Meaning of Mariah Carey offered colorful details about Carey’s personal life, including her contentious marriage to former Sony Music head Tommy Mottola and her fling with Derek Jeter. But arguably its most surprising morsel was that, amid the recording of her smash fifth album Daydream, Carey released a secret alt-rock album. She described it as “irreverent, raw, and urgent.”
Carey revealed neither the band name nor the project title in her memoir, but alongside an excerpt on Twitter, she included the hashtag #Chick. It was enough for her fanbase to go on: the Lambily discovered that a band named Chick released an album called Someone’s Ugly Daughter in 1995, the same year as Daydream, sparking questions. How could one of the most visible pop stars in the universe quietly release an alt-rock album under an alias? And what did Carey hope to prove with the side project?
With fans looking for answers, copies of Chick’s Someone’s Ugly Daughter soon garnered up to $800 on Amazon and eBay. (It currently sells on Discogs for $100 to $200, but the full album isn’t available on streaming services.) Still, outside of a passage in The Meaning of Mariah Carey, few knew specifics about the album’s creation. Now, in interviews with Pitchfork, collaborators detail the recording process, describing the project as an antithesis to Carey’s meticulous pop star image.
“We all had been doing the ‘professional music business’ thing, and this brought us back to just playing for fun,” says Gary Cirimelli, a computer sequencer and programmer for Carey’s albums who became Chick’s guitarist. “There were no expectations.”
While working on Daydream in the summer of 1995, Carey and her longtime producer, Walter Afanasieff, explored the notion of making punk music for fun. According to Afanasieff, Carey had an idea built around Malibu Barbie. For her, an alter-ego project could be an outlet for some of the anger simmering in her personal life. Inspired by bands like Hole, Garbage, and Sleater-Kinney, she channeled frustrations about her marriage into the music. “I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time. You know the ones who seemed to be so carefree with their feelings and their image,” she writes in her memoir. “They could be angry, angsty, and messy, with old shoes, wrinkled slips, and unruly eyebrows, while every move I made was so calculated and manicured. I wanted to break free, let loose, and express my misery—but I also wanted to laugh.”
Carey and her team would work on Daydream during the day at Studio One in New York City’s Hit Factory before switching to recording what would become Someone’s Ugly Daughter around midnight. Dana Jon Chappelle, Carey’s longtime engineer, was there for the impromptu studio sessions and witnessed the band’s natural progression. “It just sort of happened,” he says. “There was a drum kit in the room, and ideas started floating between her and Walter.” They’d go until as late as six in the morning, recording on Sony 48-track reels. “We would pull the reels off, throw on a blank reel, and start cutting,” Cirimelli adds. “There was no programming involved. It was all just old school.”
According to Afanasieff, Carey originally titled the project Eel Tree. (While flying out from Amsterdam, she noticed trees that looked as if they had eels dangling from their branches, he says.) After the name was official, the group agreed that no one would use their real names in the project’s credits. Carey went by D. Sue, while Afanasieff used the moniker W. Vlad, an abbreviation of Walter and his legal first name, Vladimir. Cirimelli, who received a writing credit on three tracks, went by “W. Chester,” as in Westchester County, New York, where Carey and her team did tour rehearsal.
The songwriting for the project happened quickly and was different from anything Carey had ever done. “She would come in with half a song, and within 20 minutes, we’d start cutting it,” says Cirimelli. “We would laugh at some of the ideas Mariah would come up with lyrically and go, ‘That has to stay.’”
Arrangements evolved organically, too. Cirimelli says the band would pull in studio staff and interns to contribute background vocals and ad-libs. “We were calling people into the studio—friends that were hanging around, staff, people with Mariah,” Chappelle recalls. “It didn’t matter if you could sing or not. [Mariah] just wanted a bunch of people putting vocals on the record.”
Afanasieff saw Carey’s personality as the perfect fit for an alter-ego project. “She was always clowning around and doing voices and characters,” he says. “We were pretending to be drunk and stoned, like that really dark punk rock scene.” One song on the finished version of the album, titled “Hermit,” opens with the lyrics, “I am vinegar, and water/I am someone’s ugly daughter/I am wading in the water/I am locked inside a closet/I am dripping like a faucet/I am twisted like a sausage.”
But when the powers that be found out about the album, Sony Music (the parent company of Carey’s then-label Columbia) refused to release the record with Carey’s vocals as the lead. Afanasieff says Sony renamed the band from Eel Tree to Chick, and made Carey—who co-wrote every song except for the cover of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender”—sanitize many of the more explicit lyrics. They also brought in Carey’s friend Clarissa Dane to become the face of Chick and layered Dane’s vocals on top of Carey’s, thus masking her voice. Instead of releasing the project under Columbia, Sony moved it to Epic under 550 Records.
By that point, Carey had amassed eight No. 1 songs in the first four years of her career and carved out a lane as a powerhouse vocalist. Sony saw the album as too much of a deviation from her carefully crafted pop image. “I got kind of in trouble for making this album—the alternative album—because back then, everything was super-controlled by the powers that be,” Carey told Zane Lowe in an interview last December. “I never really was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to release it.’ But then I was like, I should release it. I should do it under an alias. Let people discover it and whatever, but that got squashed.”
For the album’s packaging, Carey turned to Sony’s art department. “I wrote the title with pink lipstick over a Polaroid picture Tommy had taken of a giant dead cockroach in Italy,” Carey writes in her memoir. “I told them to add a smashed-up eye shadow makeup palette.” Tracy Boychuk, then a junior art director at Sony, remembers Sony A&R Michael Goldstone asking her to design the Chick cover art using the Polaroids from Carey. She never met or spoke to the singer during the process, but her marching orders were clear: make it look “rock.”
“The direction was me trying to take a blurry photograph that wasn’t very interesting and making it look like something deliberate,” Boychuk explained via email. “The rest of the album package was just images of her friend [Dane]… It all felt a bit disingenuous, but I understood that the label was not going to risk a huge pop success with a bad rock record. It wasn’t very compelling. It was just another assignment that I sometimes look back on and shake my head.”
Someone’s Ugly Daughter arrived in September 1995 to little fanfare. Its two singles, “Demented” and “Malibu,” were brooding in different ways: The former focused around the tortured repetition of the phrase “I crave you,” while the latter was more pop-punk-ish, with bratty lines like, “If I were Malibu Barbie and you were suntan Ken/I’d probably dump your ass for G.I. Joe ’cause he’s macho, yeah.” Neither song charted on Billboard, and though “Malibu” received mild airplay at MTV (including some crude commentary from Beavis & Butt-Head), it failed to gain traction. In hindsight, both videos contained references to the Mariah-verse, from a close-up of a butterfly on Dane’s neck in “Demented” to a cameo by Carey’s dog in “Malibu.”
“We were working the records to alternative radio, but they didn’t think it was alternative,” says Hilary Lerner, who was then EVP of radio promotion at 550 Records. “The first single did not do well. But we still put out another. Clearly, it was a ‘priority list project.’” In other words, the label made an effort to push the singles. But would the media have responded better if Carey was publicly associated with the project?
“Sony just wanted it to go away,” Chappelle says. “Maybe they felt like it was a threat to the pop sales. Maybe they felt like it would confuse people.” It’s a feat that Carey got the record released at all. “Mariah can be… She’s a very strong person, and she can be very influential,” Chappelle adds. “It was out there for a minute, but I think it was too much for Sony. It’s too different from Mariah, the pop star.”
Fans wonder if Carey will ever re-release the project with complete transparency. “I just found the version with my vocals, but I need to find the board mixes from back then,” Carey told Lowe. For his part, Cirimelli would like others to hear what the album sounds like with Carey’s vocals center stage. “God, that would be awesome to hear her vocals on top of that again,” Cirimelli says. “As far as I know, we were the only ones who ever heard that.”
The Chick album was a sign of what Carey could do without the interference of executives. Her split from Tommy Mottola during the recording of 1997’s Butterfly gave her room to pursue collaborations in the hip-hop and R&B realm, and she reached new heights on “ Honey” with producers Puff Daddy, Q-Tip, and Stevie J behind the wheel. She would gradually take more control of her creative direction, spearheading albums like her 2005 comeback, The Emancipation of Mimi. It’s unclear if the stars will ever align for Carey to drop her alt-rock album as she intended, but if she ever does, this time it’ll be on her terms.