"Carey sheds cocoon for wings of song"

     FOUR years ago, after her first concert special on television, Mariah
Carey retreated to her New York home and tried to put her career into focus. 

     It had been a dizzying career that saw her first five singles rocket
to No. 1, helping to turn the former waitress and hat-check girl into a diva cited in the same
breath as Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, and even Barbra Streisand. 

     "I was staring at the moon and thinking, 'Wow, I've really come a long
way, but have I reflected on it?' " says Carey, now 27. 

     "Because at that point, I had accomplished so much so quickly ... and
I was sitting there just thinking about the little girl that dreamt about doing what I had
just done, and realising there was so much of the same person inside of me." 

     Carey unleashes more of that person -- a woman-child with a
multi-racial past who moved 13 times with her divorced mother -- on a revealing new album,
Butterfly. It illustrates a deeper side of Carey, known often as a videogenic pop princess who
hides a lot from her public. 

     "I'm letting more of myself come through in the music. I'm allowing
more truth to be there. I think I've let my guard down in a lot of ways," says the singer, who
separated recently from husband Tommy Mottola (the president of Sony Records) and is
"growing as an independent woman" more each day. 

     While Carey stared at that moon four years ago, she jotted down lyrics
to Close Your Eyes, which was finally finished for the new album. She had released two
albums in the interim (1994's Music Box and 1995's seven million-selling Daydream) but
waited to complete the song until she had more confidence in sharing personal insights. 

     As the song says: "I was a wayward child with the weight of the world
that I held deep inside/ Life was a winding road and I learnt many things little ones
shouldn't know ...maybe I grew up too soon ... funny how one can learn to grow numb to
the madness and block it away." 

     "What I did as a child," says the native of Manhattan and Long Island,
"was block everything out and say, 'I'm going be a singer, I'm going to be OK,
I'm going to get out of this.' So that's what got me through. Music has always been my
saviour. And over the last few years, just dealing with this whole bizarre thing of being in the
public eye added a whole new dimension." 

     Musically and philosophically, she comes of age on the new disc. It
teams her with hot street producers Sean "Puffy" Combs and David Morales, as well as
longtime collaborator Walter Afanasieff. It features a more deeply erotic passion in her
vocals, which carried over to the video for the single, Honey, in which she wears a
revealing dress and later a bikini. 

     She admits to breaking down occasionally because her private life is
so dissected by tabloid media, but, regarding Mottola, she bears no animosity."We'll always
be friends regardless of what we go through or whatever happens ... whatever we went through
is just really personal to us. 

     "Right now, I feel like I'm in a good place. And the reason I named
the album Butterfly is I feel strongly about that song as a writer, but also because it's a
very hopeful song -- a song of strength, about being strong enough to recognise when a situation
is not right and having the power within yourself to let that go." 

     The honesty depicted in her new disc, for which she co-wrote all but
one of the tracks, was helped by acting classes she took last year. "Acting has helped to
access my emotions that much better, and to relive experiences from the past." 

     She is freer these days -- and the listener is the better for it. She
does not over-sing, as she has been prone to do with her spectacular, multi-octave voice. Nor
does she shirk from belting when the need arises. "I let out a lot of emotion during the
making of the album and that's why I feel so close to it. It's been like therapy." -- BPI