A few weeks back, I was at a friend’s house for dinner. We sat around The Cheese Machine and melted the good stuff and filled our insides, and it was fucking glorious of course. It was a wonderful treat, a birthday celebration, belated, because I had been away on holiday to privately mark that occasion. A couple of our best buddies decided, when we were back, to treat us to a meal at their place. The best present!
Me being me, as soon as I walked in, I clocked the music. “Good tune,” I said. “I love this one, been playing it so much lately”. It was Underworld.
“You’ll probably recognise a lot of this music,” came the wry reply.
It was my playlist. The one I made to mark turning fifty.
Playlist: 50
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Jul 20
From time to time I like to make and share playlists. Been a while. Made this one the other day, for obvious reasons I suppose. But really, I just wanted to put fifty songs in an order that were all tunes I listened to a lot at some point, and have loved since I first heard them. Obviously many of my all-time favourite songs are not here, but these are …
Let me clarify, I am not some monster that rang ahead and requested they play the music I curated. Nor do they fear the suggestion and just automatically comply ahead of time. This, once again, was a lovely gesture from our friends. It was a wee birthday celebration, so, when in Rome…
Anyway, look, this is all a bit of a rambling preamble…
Not quite midway through the playlist, but possibly midway through the evening, the host hit me with the line, “this song took me by surprise I must say”. She then added, “but pleasantly…”
It was Mariah Carey.
The point of the playlist was to pick 50 songs that had somehow gotten under my skin — and stayed there throughout and across the years. Not quite my fifty favourite songs of all time. But fifty songs I wanted to hear in that order, and that mean something every time I hear them.
There were three likely candidates when it came to Mariah Carey. Emotions, which was the one I picked. Banger! But also Vision of Love, that startling debut shout that I heard way back — a soul cry, a vamp, a pop song, a girl-next-door-becoming-diva-before-our-eyes:
Or the cover of The Jackson 5 song, I’ll Be There, from her MTV Unplugged showcase which resulted in a wee stopgap EP, Mariah a couple of albums into her career and taking the world by storm:
I’ll Be There is amazing. And Mariah’s version is so good. And it was the easiest one to say you liked, as a 14 or 15 year old boy from Hawke’s Bay, because you could point to the original and say you were just appreciating the legacy of a very fine song (true!) To get to excited about Emotions or Vision of Love would be to admit to the projected ‘crush’ your friends would drape across you; you might get labelled with a homophobic slur too, or instead, because that was easy come, easy go back then. No thought. No fear. No consequences. No one capturing everyone’s little mistakes and broadcasting.
It was an interesting time to be a music fan, and I have written about this before, but I really struggled to admit to a lot of the things I loved, they really became secret, guilty pleasures (a half a dozen Madonna songs, two Cyndi Lauper albums, pre I Will Always Love Love You Whitney) that did not align with the boring, masculine staples of prog-rock and guitar heroes and heavy metal and punk and hardcore. And of course the hip-hop of that era too. Music felt male dominated and the women had better have written their own songs if they were going to get a look in!
I adored Suzanne Vega’s music from first listen, Joni Mitchell’s too. Patti Smith, Joan Armatrading, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, Tracy Chapman, Stevie Nicks solo and with Fleetwood Mac, and all of this was safe, and did not require an explanation. These were writers, great, great writers.
Of course Cyndi Lauper is a fantastic songwriter, Madonna has many composer credits, but back then it just seemed like everyone ignored that, and Mariah Carey has written or cowritten about 90% of her material. But it was easier for the others to just say, without listening, that she probably was a puppet.
As the 1990s progressed, I wasn’t too bothered by liking or not liking Mariah Carey, the occasional video would pop up all the time, and eventually you’d be realising there was a gem of a pop-song chorus deep inside a bit of treacly R’n’B.
And then even more with the pop/hip-hop crossovers…and just absolute bangers:
As the years went on I realised that I was probably a candidate for that dreaded item that exposes the hardcore music collector as also just a casual fan sometimes: The Greatest Hits Album.
I took the plunge and bought the # 1’s comp on vinyl:
Saturday Morning Records: #14 — Mariah Carey’s Number 1’s
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November 1, 2024
Forgive me father for I have sinned. I made it all the way to my late-40s before owning a single Mariah Carey album. But I have made up for it. I promise. Late last year, I took possession of the remnants of a friend’s CD collection. Included was a copy of Mariah Carey’s
I could justify this, it could sit in my DJ crate and I could play an ironic or surprise banger from it. But then I remembered that I don’t really DJ anymore, so it just because a nice record to play on a Saturday morning.
Around this time, I also started to buy up old CDs. Which meant I could, for a dollar or two, find something that would have absolutely felt like a guilty pleasure, or worse, back in the day.
Only CDs Is Sounding Like These # 43: Mariah Carey, “Emotions” (1991)
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June 5, 2025
When I was 13/14/15, I thought Mariah Carey was incredible. An amazing talent, with heaps of cool songs, a little bit R’n’B, a little bit pop, lots of great balladry, and though I didn’t love everything, I could tell she was a hell of a singer. But, it really didn’t line up with much of what I listened to (save for a bit of Janet Jackson here, and a li…
I‘d always wanted Mariah Carey’s 1990 debut Vision of Love on cassette tape back when it was released. But felt nervous to purchase. I liked the swift followup, 1991’s Emotions as well. In both cases, the title tracks did heavy lifting, and it would take me years to find that there were further gems on each album.
I very nearly bought the Unplugged EP, feeling like I could justify that. A quirky little filler, with that majestic cover version, I didn’t need to own anything else, nor explain it.
Of course, iPods on shuffle, and making playlists, streaming, YouTube, and now a return to physical media has changed all of this stupid macho perception nonsense. Writers like Nick Hornby creating books that talk about single songs, and the emotional connection as the real value, have helped as well.
Getting older and not giving a fuck is useful too.
And if I was to recommend you read one book about Mariah Carey, it would be her hilarious, brilliant memoir:
I’ve read it. Listened to the audiobook also. Bought two extra copies, which I have given away. And cannot recommend it enough!
But if you were to read two books about Mariah Carey, you might also consider this one:
Why Mariah Carey Matters is part of a very good series, academics write about why a particular musical subject ‘matters’, I’ve read ones on The Beach Boys, Ramones, Sinead O’Connor, and Karen Carpenter. There are others. I’ve loved every volume. The Mariah one is a gem!
When I started my series banging on about tapes, and started rapidly (re) collecting cassette tapes, I finally had the medium for Mariah — I got the Unplugged, the debut, and a couple of others.
I’ve gone from having never owned a Mariah Carey album, to copies of things across all formats.
By no means am I an expert, nor looking to be, there are several albums in her discography I haven’t heard — and maybe I never will, though me being me, I will probably listen to her whole discography across a month sometime in the future, since this piece of writing I’m doing right now has just triggered that thought and I’ll feel that I have to make good on it; complete the circle.
But definitely I am comfortable with calling myself a fan. She’s funny, outrageous, arrogant, brilliantly so — and of course she delivers. What a singer.
Available for iOS and Android
Most recently I’ve become very interested in her latest record —
— released late last year, I wasn’t at first that interested in listening to it. Reports of her voice fading. And of course this happens. But something remained curious for me, and I’m sure glad I delved into it.
The voice has changed, it’s going, and the writing has changed to reflect that:
And to show she’s still a world class song interpreter, she covers Wings’ My Love. My god this is good. Okay, it helps that I’m a hopeless shill for Macca. But wow. This is good:
Also, it hits for me right as I’m going through a huge McCartney surge (once again) and while absorbing as much of the work of Harry Nilsson as I can, and writing about that mostly through poetry. I spotted a connection between Mariah and Harry, both incredible song interpreters, who also had hits of their own.
They of course are connected by both covering Badfinger’s Without You, and arguably they have the two defining versions, relative to their eras/generations.
Mariah’s version was released just days after Harry Nilsson died. That probably wasn’t planned at all. But I like to think it was.
This essay has been in my mind for a long time, and is ongoing. And I have written about Mariah Carey a few times already, as linked above. But yeah, this new album is giving me a whole other appreciation of her.
I just wanted to share that.
And so if you made it this far in spite of the disconnected intro, and you now think of me as The Cheese Machine for writing about Mariah Carey, I do at least have a Mariah-free edition of the weekly playlist. In fact this one is quite random, and I love that. And hope you do too.
Short Story: The Cheese Machine
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Aug 10
We all sat at the Cheese Machine. We placed our Raclette, we faced each other, we let the heat take over. Someone said something about something, someone else had a go at answering. But there was bread to warm, and condiments to check in on, and the cheese needed to be scraped from the dish. So pretty soon we were just at the Cheese Machine, like worker…
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