A week after declaring that “THANKSGIVING IS CANCELED,” Mariah Carey has reemerged with her upcoming memoir’s most shocking revelation yet. In a tweet on Sunday, the singer says she would unwind from her 1995 Daydream sessions by moonlighting as an alt-rocker with the band Chick. As reported by Pitchfork, Carey wrote, produced, and sang background vocals on every song on Chick’s 1995 album, Someone’s Ugly Daughter, though she went uncredited at the time.
“Fun fact: I did an alternative album while I was making Daydream,” she wrote. “Just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days.” Accompanying the tweet is a 40-second excerpt from the song “Hermit,” which she says features her backing vocals as a “hidden layer.”
“I’m so happy yet thoroughly amused that my little ‘alternative’/‘grunge’ album is finally out there for the fans,” she wrote in a follow-up tweet.
G/O Media may get a commission
As Rolling Stone points out, Someone’s Ugly Daughter was engineered in part by Jay Healy, a longtime Carey collaborator who also engineered Daydream. Carey, it turns out, was roommates with Chick’s lead singer, Clarissa Dane.
“I’d bring my little alt-rock song to the band and hum a silly guitar riff,” reads the excerpt. “They would pick it up and we would record it immediately. It was irreverent, raw, and urgent, and the band got into it.”
It continues:
I actually started to love some of the songs. I would fully commit to my character. 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. 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. I totally looked forward to doing my alter-ego band sessions after Daydream each night.
In a tweet on Monday, Carey said she’s “on a quest to unearth the version of his album with my lead vocals and will not stop until we find it!”
So, while we look forward to this near-forgotten album’s imminent resurgence, why not check out the below video for Chick’s “Malibu”? According to a rep for Carey, it was directed by the soon-to-be Queen of Christmas.
Send Great Job, Internet tips to gji@theonion.com