Singer Mariah Carey takes it 7 octaves high
If Mariah Carey had never been born, some record company executive would have surely invented her. She has a seven-octave voice and looks and ambition well beyond the whisper range. She also can write and arrange songs. The only question is why she had to wait until age 20 to hit it big. "For a year I couldn't pay someone to listen to my tape," explained Carey, whose debut single, the 1950s-styled ballad Vision of Love, quickly topped the charts.
"They think if you don't have a high-powered manager or don't have a record company that's already interested in you, you're no good. I had no connections and I was running with my writing partner (Ben Margulies), who was also new and didn't have any connections, either," she said.
After working in bars and restaurants around New York, Carey was signed by Columbia Records. She had been singing backup for Brenda Kay Starr, a Columbia artist, and managed to get herself into a party attended by company President Tommy Mottola.
"Someone grabbed him and told him to listen to the tape," Carey recalled. "He got out in his car, played it, and turned around and came back to find me." Carey's range is so powerful that the two highest octaves are unintelligible to human ears. This is a voice that can probably shatter glass and then put it back together, that sounds as if she's taking the words and twirling them over her head like a cowboy with a lasso.
Mariah Carey includes 11 songs, most of them co-written by Carey and Margulies. "A lot of those songs were written when I was kind of struggling, before I had a record deal," she said. "It was a harrowing emotional time in my life. I was doing odd jobs and going towards this goal. They were about things happening in my life." (Dayton Daily News)
|
