Mariah Carey Reveals Secret Alternative Album Recorded During ‘Daydream’ Sessions

Mariah Carey revealed in an excerpt from her upcoming memoir that she secretly made an alternative rock album during the sessions for her 1995 LP Daydream.

“Fun fact: I did an alternative album while I was making Daydream,” Carey tweeted Sunday. “Just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days.”

In The Meaning of Mariah Carey excerpt the singer posted Sunday, she wrote of the secret LP, “I’d bring my little alt-rock song to the band and hum a silly guitar riff. They would pick it up and we would record it immediately. It was irreverent, raw, and urgent, and the band got into it. I actually started to love some of the songs. I would fully commit to my character.”

She continued, “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 movie 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.”

Fun fact: I did an alternative album while I was making Daydream 👀 Just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days. Here's a little of what I wrote about it in #TheMeaningOfMariahCarey 🤟 S/O to my friend Clarissa who performs the lead w/ me as a hidden layer #Chick #TMOMC pic.twitter.com/Re23t5whcd

— Mariah Carey (@MariahCarey) September 27, 2020

The excerpt also features a 40-second snippet of music as well as the artwork for Chick’s Someone’s Ugly Daughter, an actual album released in 1995 on 550 Music, which operated under the Sony/Columbia umbrella (Carey’s label at the time). “S/O to my friend Clarissa who performs the lead w/ me as a hidden layer,” Carey tweeted.

While Carey is uncredited on the Chick album, the Someone’s Ugly Daughter liner notes, according to AllMusic, list Jay Healy and Dana Jo Chapelle as the album’s engineers; Healy is a frequent Carey collaborator, serving as engineer on both Daydream (which Carey recorded at the same time) and its 1997 follow-up Fantasy.

Following the one album, Chick never released any further music, although the band did shoot some Carey-less music videos:

Someone’s Ugly Daughter also features a cover of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender”: