It was an amazing feeling, and I was obsessed with replaying the encounter and fantasizing what it could lead to.”Ĭarey started writing this Butterfly track - which she calls “the realest, boldest, most passionate love song I’d ever written” - after she secretly met up with Jeter on a trip to Puerto Rico toward the end of her marriage to Mottola. “It’s exactly what happened.” Describing its importance to her, Carey continues, “It was major for me, not for any salacious reason but because any intimacy with another human being was not something I had experienced before, ever. “‘The Roof (Back in Time)’ was my first complete docu-song,” she writes. She included the sample of Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Part II,” she adds, because she remembers the song playing on her way home from her date with Jeter. Carey started coming up with the lyrics in bed after having a rooftop escapade with Jeter while she was still married to Mottola. “It felt like all the fun I had missed out on in my childhood,” she writes.įans have long thought “The Roof” is about Carey’s relationship with Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, and she confirms this in the memoir. Get the fuck outta here with that.” Carey, though, says she couldn’t stop listening to the remix. “The fuck is that?” Carey remembers him saying. “I may have even started jumping up and down on the bed!” Of the verse, she adds, “That was IT! Ol’ Dirty Bastard spit crazy brilliance and scorched our pristine white bedroom with the grime and righteous fun I’d been craving!” Mottola, who “generally considered rap background noise,” wasn’t a fan.
“Wheeeeeeeeeee! I couldn’t contain myself,” she writes of the moment she heard his iconic intro. Carey was at home with Mottola the night Ol’ Dirty Bastard recorded, so someone called from the studio to play his verse. Sony pushed back on the idea, she writes - “they thought he was certifiably crazy and that I was about to throw my entire fan base into shock.” But Puff made it happen. It was the first time I felt safe enough to go back and peek in on Mariah, the little one, and recognize what she had survived.”Ī fan of hip-hop since the beginning of her career, Carey was excited to work with Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs for a remix of “Fantasy,” which she suggested should feature Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard.
“The enormity, complexity, and instability of the road I had traveled to get into this bath hit me. “Images of the scene I had just left - adoring fans screaming and crying - flashed through my mind, blending with painful recollections of my brother screaming and my mother crying, of myself as a lonely little girl in a neglected dress,” she confesses. ‘Hero’ belonged to my fans, and I was going to deliver it to them with all I had.”Ĭarey started writing “Close My Eyes” while taking a bath after that Thanksgiving special, eventually finishing the song for her 1997 album, Butterfly. “I decided that this song did not actually belong to Gloria Estefan, a movie, Tommy, or me. “The initial trepidation I felt about singing it live for the first time in front of an audience was melting away as I thought about all the people who had lined the streets and packed the theater to see me that night,” she writes. “I did my best to reclaim it, but it was a gift no matter who it was for.”Ĭarey debuted “Hero” during her Thanksgiving special, Here Is Mariah Carey - one of the first times she had realized her level of fame. So Carey changed some of the lyrics: “I went to the well of my memories and dipped into that moment when Nana Reese had told me to hold on to my dreams,” she writes. Sony Music’s CEO and her then-husband, Tommy Mottola, however, insisted the song go on her album instead. “As Walter worked to find the basic chords, I began to sing, ‘and then a hero comes along.’” Carey first thought the song was “fairly generic” and calls the demo “a bit schmaltzy,” but she thought it worked for the movie.
“As soon as I got back into the room, I sat right down at the piano and said to Walter, ‘This is how it goes.’ I hummed the tune and some of the lyrics,” she remembers. She came up with the chorus on her way back from the bathroom during a studio meeting.
I was in the studio, doing it.” The song, she adds, “remains one of my favorites.”Ĭarey originally intended this Music Box hit for Gloria Estefan, for the Dustin Hoffman–starring movie Heroes. “I did dance tracks, straight down the line, all different sounds. I experimented with the songs,” she writes. Carey started writing this Mariah Carey cut at the piano in her mother’s house, then recorded a demo of it at the studio of a producer for whom she sang backup.