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The album to start with
Butterfly (1997)
Mariah Carey ’s early 90s commercial megastardom was founded on the basis of her virtuoso vocal prowess, but her sixth album, Butterfly, was where she truly established her artistic voice. Her first work after divorcing Sony Music boss Tommy Mottola – a marriage she would later describe as an emotionally abusive “private hell” – Butterfly also finds Carey breaking free of schmaltzy adult contemporary arrangements in favour of a lovingly crafted, hip-hop-inflected quiet storm.
It’s around this time that listeners started questioning whether Carey’s voice was diminishing in quality, but the level of vocal creativity she brings to Butterfly should render the criticism irrelevant: here, it’s an instrument of texture rather than volume, with pillows of lavishly layered vocals and nuanced phrasing magnifying the emotional intensity of the songs. That’s exemplified by Breakdown, perhaps Carey’s finest song: whisper-sung run-on lines lull the listener into a haze that’s so blissed-out you almost miss lyrics such as “gradually I’m dying inside” – at least until the twitchy beat stops, a velvet carpet suddenly pulled from under your feet.
The best of Butterfly is dark, weighty stuff: Carey would later write that it represents freedom (and is her favourite album), but its depiction of being trapped – in “the memory of a song”, as on the magnificently brooding My All – is where it strikes deepest. But it’s also weirdly playful at times, Carey’s idiosyncrasies flourishing in both her eccentric verbosity (“Fly abandonedly into the sun,” she exhorts on the title track; “I guess I’m trying to be nonchalant about it,” she...