Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey was born on March 27, 1969, in Huntington, New York, to Patricia Hickey, an opera singer and vocal coach, and Alfred Roy Carey, an aeronautical engineer. After moving to Manhattan, she worked with songwriter Ben Margulies and made a demo tape that reached Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola. Signed in 1988, she released her self-titled debut album in 1990. The record produced four consecutive US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles: “Vision of Love,” “Love Takes Time,” “Someday,” and “I Don’t Wanna Cry.” Its success established her as a major new pop and R&B singer in America then.

Her 1993 album Music Box became one of the decade’s best-selling albums, propelled by “Dreamlover” and “Hero.” In 1994, she recorded Merry Christmas, whose “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was written and produced with Walter Afanasieff. The song later reached number one on the Hot 100 and became a recurrent global holiday hit. Daydream, released in 1995, included “Fantasy,” a chart-topper featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard on its remix. Butterfly followed in 1997, marking a more explicit move toward hip-hop and contemporary R&B collaborations. Her lead single, “Honey,” debuted at number one in the United States that same year.

She returned to chart prominence with The Emancipation of Mimi in 2005. Its single “We Belong Together” spent fourteen weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and was named the chart’s Song of the Decade for the 2000s. The album won three Grammy Awards in 2006, including Best Contemporary R&B Album. In 2009, Carey appeared as a social worker in Lee Daniels’ Precious, a film adapted from Sapphire’s novel Push. Her performance brought nominations from several critics’ groups. In 2018, she released Caution, an album developed with artists including Blood Orange, Skrillex, and Timbaland to widespread critical acclaim.

Carey is known for a five-octave vocal range and use of the whistle register, audible in recordings such as “Emotions” and “Fantasy.” Guinness World Records has credited her with several chart achievements, including the most US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles by a solo artist. In 2019, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” finally topped the Hot 100, twenty-five years after its original release. It returned to number one in later holiday seasons. Across her career, she has written or co-written the majority of her own material and served as a producer on numerous recordings. She continues performing worldwide.