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MisplacedValidity

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#141 [url]

Sep 4 13 11:58 AM

^ Yeah for some reason I hadn't ever thought of adding "EL" But it makes complete sense as it came out in that same era, and it fits the sound of the album.

Anyway, I think these are all new to this thread:
http://thedrop.fm/mariah-careys-music-box-turns-20/
http://loft965.com/2013/08/31/mariah-careys-monumental-music-box-20-years-old-today/
http://matthewhocter.blogspot.com/2013/08/music-box-by-mariah-carey-20-years.html

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robjv1

Posts: 10,743 True in love and wisdom, well off and witty, using god's sleeve to wipe the hell off the city.

#142 [url]

Sep 4 13 11:59 AM

Good lord, look at all the Music Box coverage! I guess I shouldn't be that surprised, but it seems like it came out long enough ago that people would have forgotten it.

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MisplacedValidity

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#144 [url]

Sep 4 13 1:18 PM

Yeah I would really expect coverage next year for "AIWFCIY"/MC turning 20. Not that I see it happening but Sony should release a special edition.

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robjv1

Posts: 10,743 True in love and wisdom, well off and witty, using god's sleeve to wipe the hell off the city.

#146 [url]

Sep 5 13 8:41 AM

Gingerinthedryer wrote:
Pictures from the Music Box era are just gorgeous.
There are a lot of pretty ones -- I love the expanded version of the album cover especially.

Your name on here puts an odd image into my mind --

559574237_2c0fd76dfb_m.jpg




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MisplacedValidity

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#147 [url]

Sep 20 13 2:16 PM

I finally tracked down the Billboard review/article by Timothy White that I love; I love his comments about her singing, and also how he makes the connection between Mariah's chaotic past and the feeling of vulnerability and belief on MB:

Mariah Carey's Stirring 'Music Box'

Many say it's the unimpeachable power of her high-coloratura vocals that assured Mariah Carey's success, but after hearing her heart-piercing "Music Box" album (Columbia, due Aug. 31) some may hereafter maintain that it was actually the perceptive hurt in her voice.

"I always used to sing when I was a little girl if I was upset about something," says Carey, sitting alone in mix room A of Sony Music Studios, on Manhattan's West Side, after listening for the first time to the final mastering of her much-anticipated third full-length album. "Some kids go outside and play basketball or something, but I would take a walk by myself in the woods, or wherever nobody was, and I'd sing to myself."

The enduringly reflective pangs in her singing are perhaps the most absorbing aspect of Carey's four-octave abilities. Whether it's "Vision of Love," from her 1990 self-titled debut, "Make It Happen" from 1991's "Emotions" collection, the savvy exuberance of 1992's "MTV Unplugged EP," or the current "Dreamlover" single, Mariah's earnest interior monologues convey the doctrine that belief is its own dominion/sanctuary.

As a consecration of this view, "Music Box" is easily the most elemental of Carey's releases, her vocal eurythmics in natural sync with songs that examine the personal ferment of faith, particularly fidelity to one's most private emotional ideals. Unlike her previous studio efforts, technical perfection has been downplayed in favor of feel and flow - a move aligned with her decision to tour this fall. "I'm just more comfortable being myself, and letting go," she says.

"Music Box" treats trust as a secular sacrament. Yet the album confronts an era when constancy and its sensual value have been despoiled by meanness of spirit, any hint of devotional candor automatically decried as declasse. One must venture back to the best Motown work of Tammi Terrell to find singing so instinctive in its exaltation of vulnerability as (arduous) virtue.

Nonetheless, the material is marbled with admissions of "disillusion," "loneliness and emptiness," and the dread that "everything fades away." To understand why somebody would put such feelings on the public record (Carey is the lyricist and co-composer of almost all the songs), one must consider the background of the singer herself.

The youngest of three children by aeronautical engineer Alfred Carey and the former Patricia Hickey, a vocal coach and onetime mezzo-soprano with the New York City Opera, Mariah was born on March 27, 1970. It was the iffy onset of an uneasy decade, as fighting raged in the Middle East, Simon & Garfunke's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was the most popular song in America, and four students at Kent State University were a week away from being slain by National Guardsmen during an anti-war demonstration.

Unbeknownst to the infant Mariah, the Carey household had its own troubles, her family soon to rupture into two separate camps, Mariah fated to be reared as if an only child.

"My parents divorced when I was 3," she says, "and after the divorce my older sister lived with my dad. My brother moved out when he was 16 and I was 6, so I grew up on my own with my mom. I was always singing around the house because she was always singing, so I would try to mimic her." A subtle grin. "She couldn't shut me up. I was like a little tape recorder."

Patricia Carey was the impressionable Mariah's inevitable exemplar, but the economically pressed parent preferred to regard her daughter as a cohort and comrade-in-arms. "She wouldn't let anybody talk baby-talk around me," Mariah says. "She had me around all her friends as a kid, and she used to say I was like a little adult. All I wanted to do was sing for my mom's friends, so I would memorize every jingle on TV, and whatever records were playing around the house, like Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin."

Those soul songs, commercial ditties, and the mother who lovingly praised Mariah's execution of each, were the only touchpoints in Carey's unsettled existence. Mrs. Carey and her daughter moved some 13 times ("I always felt the rug could be pulled out from under me") before Mariah reached her teens. Mariah's mounting sense of detachment from her ever-shifting surroundings was reinforced by schoolmates who criticized the striking looks afforded by her interracial heritage.

“My father is Venezuelan and black, and my mother’s Irish – her parents came from County Cork,” Carey explains, “so I guess I was seen as being different. I felt like an ugly duckling, but if I didn’t think I belonged, I at least knew I had a special thing: I could sing.”

It excited Mariah to discover that her maternal grandfather also had been a singer and musician. Unfortunately, Patricia Carey could share only sketchy details. “He died a month before she was born,” Mariah says, “so she didn’t know him.”

Religion was another link to her ancestry, but Patricia Carey was a fallen Catholic of conviction, so all issues of belief centered on self-reliance. An instance of personal pluck that still produces giggles for Mariah was her appearance, while still a first-grader, in a high-school production of “South Pacific,” during which she sang “Honey Bun.” Subsequent attempts to open up to adults other than her mother usually met with disappointment. “In my third-grade class at an elementary school in Northport, we got assignments to write poetry,” she recalls. “My teacher, a Mr. Cohen, wouldn’t believe I wrote them, and embarrassed me in class, telling me I copied them out of a book!”

“People try to drag you down and shatter your dreams a lot of times,” she shrugs, more bewildered than embittered, “maybe because their own dreams haven’t been fulfilled. It was funny how no teacher ever supported my singing; they would always tell me, ‘What’s gonna make you different?’ That’s why I wrote ‘Make It Happen’ on my second album. I was trying to inspire the people that nobody encourages.”

At age 14 , Carey began a secret after-school life as a demo singer for several Long Island studios, and six of the songs (including “Vision of Love”) she penned at 16with early collaborator Ben Marguiles wound up on her debut album. But the period before she signed with Columbia was a lean one, Mariah leaving home shortly after her mother’s second marriage, supporting herself at 17 with assorted gigs (“I hat-checked, sold t-shirts, waitressed in the Sports Bar and at the Boathouse Café in Central Park”) and back-up vocal stints for supporters like Brenda K Starr. “I walked and worked and waitressed in a pair of shoes with holes in them in the snow and slush,” she laughs, “living on one plate of pasta a day between three people.”

The ultimate lessons of the distance traveled are preserved in “Hero,” a moving highlight of the refreshingly open “Music Box.”

“The song is saying you don’t need someone to say, ‘It’s okay for you to do this,’” Carey says softly as she rises to go. “If you look inside yourself, and you believe, you can be your own hero.”

I love the parts about her singing and lyrics showing vulnerability and belief being okay and even important.

I found the quote about singing to herself interesting because she still prefers to sing alone.

I also found the part about her teacher not believing she wrote her poetry interesting; she still feels like she's struggling to be acknowledged as a writer.

Last Edited By: MisplacedValidity Sep 20 13 2:19 PM. Edited 1 time.

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MisplacedValidity

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#148 [url]

Sep 21 13 5:38 PM

Found another old review of Music Box that I think hits on some interesting things:

A 'Music Box' full of melody
J.D. Considine
The Baltimore Sun

One of the downsides of celebrity is that it makes people look at you funny. Instead of being known for what you did and how you did it, suddenly you become seen in terms of your looks, your quirks and your social contacts. And while that doesn't necessarily diminish the public's appreciation of your real work, it can make it hard to remember what brought you fame in the first place. Take Mariah Carey. When her self-titled debut popped up in 1990, all most listeners knew about her was her name and the sound of her voice. Now that she's a star, however, she's accorded the full People magazine treatment, so that even those who don't hear her on the radio know all about her chalk-squeak upper register, her fondness for tight, black dresses, and her recent marriage to the head of her record company.

So it's to be expected that most of the talk about Carey's third album, "Music Box," will focus on the fluff - how she looks in the "Dreamlover" video, whether "Now That I Know" (with lyrics like "My friends they told me to leave you") is about her husband, and so on. Trouble is, all this trivia overlooks the most important fact about Carey: That she really knows how to sell a melody.

Cue up any track on "Music Box," and the evidence is overwhelming. It hardly matters whether the song is loud or soft, slow or fast, straight or funky - Carey's singing invariably cuts to the melodic heart of the song, adding just enough flourish to goose the rhythm or enhance the emotional content.

Granted, it's not the flashiest singing you'll ever hear. Although Carey often takes liberties with the melodic line - note the elaborate ornamentation on "I've Been Thinking About You" - what she does is nothing compared to the intricate arabesques of singers like Mary J Blige. And then, her most daring displays are usually set against a backing chorus, ensuring that someone somewhere is delivering an unvarnished version of the melody.

Even her trademark forays into the stratosphere seem constrained this time around. Sure you can hear a few squeals in the intro to "Dreamlover," but after that she downplays them, using her extreme upper register only for a wordless hook that might as well have been played on a synthesizer (and may leave some listeners thinking it was).

But that sort of function-first thinking is typical of Carey here, and while her low-key approach may not provide much grist for the gossip mills, it definitely adds to the album's listenability. By taking the direct approach to "Dreamlover," for example, she underscores the songs' breezy melody and insinuating pulse so deftly that it takes on all the buoyant charm of a Philly soul oldie; likewise, the lean and focused reading she gives "Now That I Know" merely adds momentum to the breathless propulsion of the Clivilles and Cole rhythm track.

One of the reasons this works so well is that by playing it understated, Carey is keeping the music true to her own vision. Just listen to the way she plays up the gospel influences on the album. Where another singer might have been tempted to turn "Anytime You Need A Friend" into a full-blown sanctified sing-out, Carey and producer Walter Afanasieff use the gospel harmonies on the chorus as contrast for Carey's pop-soul vocal.

Likewise, the churchy keyboards and choir on "Just To Hold You Once Again" simply provide an emotional framework for Carey's performance, one which leaves room for her to raise the rafters without requiring that she do so with every verse.

Tellingly, the album's weakest moment comes when she doesn't try to make her own way through the music. The song is "Without You," and Carey presents it pretty much the same way Harry Nilsson did. Trouble is, all that does it point up the differences between their voices - a comparison that doesn't work in her favor.

Still, one dud out of 10 is an impressive average these days. And while maintaining that standard may not make her headline material for the tabloids, it certainly should be no cause for complaint among pop fans.

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MissyJG

Posts: 6,019 Chillin' at FOMM

#149 [url]

Sep 21 13 6:31 PM

I just listened to DYTOF and it's a damn shame it isn't on the regular tracklist. Still one of my favourite Mariah songs. People should hear that song. Same goes for EFA but at least that one made it as a bonus for Europe.

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BeyondIdolization

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In the sands of time

#154 [url]

Sep 22 13 10:20 AM

Those reviews were nice reads and while I agree with a lot of it, it's weird seeing critics rave about a Mariah album I'm not even that fond of.

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MisplacedValidity

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#155 [url]

Oct 5 13 8:27 PM

Colson wrote:
BeyondIdolization wrote:
MisplacedValidity wrote:

"Endless Love" peaked at #2 but that was mostly due to initial hype; it didn't have much longevity. I love that covet, though. They are such better/smoother singers than Lionel and especially Diana.

I never got how some could say Lionel and Diana's version was better, neither of them can sing. I think those who say that are just nostalgic. Clearly Luther and Mariah took an almost unlistenable song and made it good with their great voices.

Mariah was overdoing it with her vocal gymnastics. It's rare I say that she oversings, but she did on this song. Holding those notes on the word 'care' were just unnecessary. Nostalgic or not, the original version sounded more natural without trying too hard.
I can agree the original is less polished and maybe in that sense comes across as more natural to some people, but I very much prefer the Luther/Mariah version. I also don't see where Mariah oversings much. I don't see why holding out "care" is such a big deal; she didn't even use melisma there. There are plenty of songs where Mariah holds notes and uses a lot more melisma than on "EL." In particular I love how she feels, "Your every breath that I take" smiley: tongue Plus, they hold out notes and stuff on the original (Diana's first make and then their duet on "Iiii" and the drawn out "share my loooove with you"). And actually, Diana also draws out the first "caaare" so I don't get your point at all.

I like the subtle change Luther and Mariah made on the bridge; they do the ad-lib of the melody more, and they changed it from "bom/dum" to "doo."

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robjv1

Posts: 10,743 True in love and wisdom, well off and witty, using god's sleeve to wipe the hell off the city.

#156 [url]

Oct 6 13 2:40 AM

Yeah, the Mariah/Luther EL is at worst an absolutely stunning vocal performance. Luther is pretty highly regarded among critics for his vocals and is often mentioned among the best male vocalists of all-time.

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tl2mc

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#158 [url]

Oct 6 13 3:51 AM

I love Luther and Mariah's version... The vocals although very polished and stunning, they still hit the emotion of the song and build a love story.

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mcfan

Posts: 31,612

#Beautiful

#159 [url]

Oct 6 13 9:16 AM

Mariah's vocal on 'Endless Love' is gorgeous. The guitar on the breakdown >>>
Walter was a great producer.

Where's this "care" she holds, Colson?

  
  

Last Edited By: mcfan Oct 6 13 9:19 AM. Edited 1 time.

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Colson

Posts: 18,926 FOMM Extraordinaire

#160 [url]

Oct 6 13 9:23 AM

If you don't hear it....I can't help you.

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