As Mariah Carey settles into the Friday night before Labor Day, she's the picture of cozy luxury, eating Chinese food and sipping a glass of wine. And as the superstar asserts, she wouldn't have it any other way: "The Era of Mi is fabulous." Just a few days earlier, the five-time Grammy winner had heralded the "Era of Mi" in the countdown to her long-awaited 16th studio album, Here For It All.
"The Era of Mi basically just means, like, I'm gonna do whatever I want," she declared on social media, seated elegantly in front of a gigantic screen displaying the album's beaming, black-and-white cover art. "It's really just about owning the moment."
For both singer and her devoted Lambily, the moment in question has been a long time coming. After all, a new Mariah Carey album doesn't come around every day: Here For It All marks the icon's first collection of original music since 2018's chilly, atmospheric Caution.
With its carefree attitude and timeless sound, the studio set not only embraces Mimi's outlook in her newly declared era, it serves as a jubilant celebration of everything she's built throughout her record-breaking career. Across its 11 tracks, the music of Here For It All represents everything Mariah does best - from laying bare a broken heart with commanding poise on "In Your Feelings" to throwing her trademark shade with devastating accuracy on the withering "I Won't Allow It".
Out September 26, the album also provides a new soundtrack for what's turned out to be a particularly celebratory year for Carey. She just marked the 20th anniversary of her landmark, Grammy-winning 2005 album The Emancipation of Mimi with a sprawling, 40-track re-release filled with remixes, previously unreleased bonus tracks, live cuts and more.
In recent months, she's also received recognition at numerous different awards shows for, remarkably, the very first time in her career. In June, she was honored with the Ultimate Icon Award at the 2025 BET Awards; months later, she received the Michael Jackson Vanguard Video Award at the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards. ("I can't believe I'm getting my first VMA tonight. I just have one question: what in the Sam Hill were you waiting for?" she quipped to rapturous applause during her acceptance speech for the latter.)
In the intervening near-decade since her last album, the Songbird Supreme has also added exciting and mind-blowingly successful layers to the unparalleled business of being Mariah Carey - including publishing The Meaning of Mariah Carey, her No. 1 New York Times best-selling memoir; collaborating with pals like Ariana Grande ("yes, and?") and Latto ("Big Energy"); and completely dominating the Christmas season, thanks to "All I Want For Christmas Is You" making its annual trip to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for the last six years and counting.
And yet, amid the nonstop accomplishments and festivities, Mariah was also quietly at work in The Butterfly Lounge, her home recording studio/personal sanctuary, creating new music with a handful of trusted collaborators. According to Carey, the birth of Here For It All occurred thanks to those signature "Mariah ballads" she teased in a June sit-down with Apple Music. "I didn't really know where they were going, what we were doing," she recalled, "I just knew that I was in ballad zone."
The first song to come out of those early sessions was "Nothing Is Impossible", an inspirational number that follows in the grand tradition of past anthems like "Hero", "Can't Take That Away (Mariah's Theme)" and The Emancipation of Mimi's Lambily-adored closer "Fly Like a Bird".
There's also "Here For It All", a personal favorite Mariah loved so much that she decided to make it the title track for the entire project. ("I named the album Here For It All because I didn't want anyone to skip over that one - even though it's the last one on the album," she quips.) Each intimate song proves that there's also a raw, vulnerable side to the Era of Mi, too - one that pulls back the curtain to show fans even more of the humanity behind one of the world's greatest voices.
Carey's new era is hardly all big ballads and melisma, though. On the chic, self-referential album opener "Mi", she sets the tone by leaning fully into her persona as the music industry's most fabulous diva, proudly declaring, "I don't care about much if it ain't about Mi. Let the money talk first, conversations ain't free. I'm the D-I-V-A, that's MC. I'm the hot toddie, hottie body, yea that's tea."
And when it came time to kickstart the official roll-out for Here For It All at the beginning of the summer, she selected the hotshot "Type Dangerous" as its lead single - a banger that finds her strutting through a crowd of adoring, autograph-hungry fans on the hunt for a bad boy (all while "dripped in Balenci', cropped leather coat and some nine-inch Fendis", naturally).
With its swaggering sound rooted in old-school soul and new jack swing, "Type Dangerous" quickly earned Mariah the milestone 50th hit of her career on the Billboard Hot 100. It also turned into a crossover success at both urban and pop radio, spending three weeks at No. 1 on the Adult R&B Songs chart, reaching the top 10 on R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and reaching the Top 40 of numerous pop tallies.
While the icon says that she was "super happy" about the single's success, she also gushes over sampling Eric B. and Rakim's 1986 debut single, "Eric B. Is President", on the track: "I mean, that sample is my favorite. Like, people have no idea how much I love that song." And though Carey admits she was initially hesitant to utilize such a treasured hip-hop classic, the choice led to yet another milestone moment this year, with Rakin joining her for an opulent, history-making performance on the BET Awards stage in June.
Along with sampling the song's stuttering, instantly recognizable refrain - "Ma-ma-make 'em, make 'em clap to this!" - Mariah cleverly interpolated some of Rakim's own lyrics from "Eric B. Is President" into the rhyme scheme of "Type Dangerous". But the most savage stanza is all Mimi as she coos, "Hit the little girls room to powder my nose. Then came in three hatin' ass hoes. They don't know the meaning of water nor soap. I don't have time for the rigamarole."
Of course, hearing an unfamiliar word like "rigamarole" in a Mariah Carey song should come as no surprise to anyone who's been listening for the last 35 years. After all, the songstress has been expanding the Lambs' understanding of the English language from the moment she found herself "so enraptured" on "Vanishing", the pristine, melismatic ballad from her 1990 self-titled debut. In Mariah's world, why use a boring, basic word when you can educate the masses with something fabulous instead?
It's not just the "rigamarole", either. The singer's sense of worldplay remains as reliably razor-sharp as ever throughout Here For It All - whether she's delivering an onomatopoeic "Clink, clink, clink, pow, look at me now" on the bittersweet "Confetti & Champagne", or promising she's "gonna use her expertise" to keep it "nice, nice, neat, neat" on the album's delightful, dancehall-inflected second single, "Sugar Sweet".
As Carey tells it, her legendary lyrical prowess is actually rooted more in the emotion of the moment rather than an academic approach to choosing the perfect word or turn of phrase.
"It's more like, What is my vibe right now? What am I feeling? And then sometimes, a specific word will just come to me that works within the sentence that we're singing. So I use it," she explains matter-of-factly. "And it's so funny, because a lot of people say to me, 'I learned to speak English from you' and different things like that. It's amazing."
On the business front, Here For It All marks Carey's first release under her very own namesake imprint, MARIAH, in an exclusive partnership with gamma. "I was so tired of the major label system," she sighs. "They're bleak, darling."
Carey personally shouted out gamma. during each of her two acceptance speeches at the VMAs on September 7. But in conversation, the Elusive Chanteuse remains rather, well, elusive about the specifics of her deal with the pioneering media company and how it may or may not change the ownership structure of her catalog.
"I've been doing this for a long time now, and I don't know what gives me more control, what doesn't," she muses. "It's just an interesting life." (Coincidentally, since its founding in 2023 by former Apple executive Larry Jackson, gamma. has also helped many of Carey's past collaborators, including Snoop Dogg, Usher, Rick Ross and French Montana, release their own records as well.)
While each of those stars have helped Mariah capture the zeitgeist over the decades on fan-favorite tracks like "It's Like That", "Crybaby" and "How Much", she went in an altogether different and more Mi-inspired direction with one particular quartet of collaborators on Here For It All: The Clark Sisters.
Together with the modern gospel icons, Carey wrote and recorded the reverential worship song "Jesus I Do". And as it turns out - despite being one of the most famous and successful artists in Billboard history - Carey is the first to admit she found herself positively starstruck once the pioneers of the famous "Clark Sound" walked into the studio.
"I've wanted to work with them forever. Especially Karen. All of them, but especially Karen because she's the First Lady!" she raves over collaborating with the Grammy-winning sister act. "It was just like a miracle - they were The Clark Sisters, and there they were sitting on the couch next to me. I have no words for how amazing that was."
Releasing her first album in nearly seven years has also given Mariah - a star notoriously averse to acknowledging the passage of time - the rare opportunity to reflect on each chapter of her historic career, which she's done album by album in the lead-up to Here For It All's unveiling.
"You know, sometimes I like it, sometimes I'm like, 'Ahh, I can't look at this, I don't want to look at this!'" MC jokes about the choice to revisit each of her 16 album covers. (She also spilled plenty of behind-the-scenes tea on the trip down memory lane - from the fact that "somebody didn't want her to be that uncovered" in the super-cropped artwork for 1993's Music Box to shooting the cover of 2002's Charmbracelet in Capri, Italy.)
"But it is great, because I'm able to reminisce. From the time I first started till now, it's a pretty long time," she continues before dropping her voice and deadpanning, "But I don't know numbers."
One number Carey is willing to recognize is the 30th anniversary of 1995's Daydream, which magically happens to coincide with the release date for Here For It All. And in conversation, it's clear that the record, which was certified 11x Platinum by the RIAA and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, remains a cherished memory worth celebrating for the superstar.
"I would have to say that 'Always Be My Baby', my first song that I wrote with my dear friend Jermaine Dupri - that's one of my favorite memories from Daydream," she says, before adding fellow charttopper "Fantasy" to the list.
"Especially the version with O.D.B.," Mariah continues. "And everybody was telling me, 'Oh, you shouldn't do that. Why are you gonna work with him? What does that mean? Why are you even doing that?' And they didn't know what they were talking about, and then it went on to be one of my biggest records ever." (Clearly, as every Lamb well knows, following her artistic intuition despite the naysayers has been a guiding principle in Mariah's career since long before she put a name to it in her current Era of Mi.)
Next up, the singer is set to return to her throne as the Queen of Christmas with her latest residency, Mariah Carey's Christmastime in Las Vegas (once "It's Time", of course). The slate of festive shows run from November 28 through December 13 at the Dolby Live at Park MGM, but don't expect Carey to hit the road for a tour any time soon.
"I just want to take a little time for me - the Era of Mi," she says. "I think we're gonna do a deluxe album and then take it from there. But right now, I just really don't want anyone to tell me that we're gonna do any kind of touring. I can't handle it."
Instead, after getting some magical help from Santa Claus and Rudolph through the holiday season, Mariah plans on jetting off for a private holiday in the sun where things will remain, obviously, all about Mi: "Up my sleeve is Eleuthra. It's a beautiful place in the Bahamas, and I've gotta go there. It's going to be next level. Eras and eras of Mi."
(Grammy.com)
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