meager studio income and make rent, she took a job waitressing at a sports bar. Compared to Long Island, Manhattan was sparkling with possibility, creativity, and innovation. Hip-hop, freestyle, and house music were all on the rise, competing for space on dancefloors, as well as the pop music landscape. Madonna, Whitney Houston, Cyndi Lauper, and Taylor Dayne were four of the biggest women singers in the world at that point in time, and they’d all come out of the New York scene in fairly recent order. In some combination of their respective careers, Mariah could see a blueprint for the career she dreamed of having. “It was all very competitive at that time,” says Arthur Baker. “Mariah had bits of all of them. She had a bit of a Latin freestyle thing, which Madonna and Taylor also had. They all made records that got played in those clubs.” THE WOODSHOP Ben Margulies’s father owned a cabinetry factory and furniture showroom on West 19th Street in Chelsea called Bedworks where, in a woodshop behind the showroom, he and Chris Toland had set up a small, rudimentary studio. It was here, surrounded by sawdust and “weird machinery that looked like it would sever a limb,” as Mariah described it in a 2003 VH1 interview, with the scent of wood and glue in the air, that Mariah Carey’s transformation from striver to superstar began taking shape. “It was about the size of a pantry,” Mariah recalled in her memoir. “It could have been a chicken coop for all I cared. What mattered was that it was almost a full recording studio, the place where I belonged. For me, the studio is part sanctuary, part playground, part laboratory. I loved being there, writing, riffing, singing, dreaming, and taking risks.” The trio worked on seventeen songs together between 1987 and 1988. The first, recorded while Mariah was still commuting from Long Island, was “Here We Go Around Again,” an uptempo, Jackson 5-style track that captured the tonal similarities between Mariah and a young Michael Jackson, years before her MTV Unplugged cover of “I’ll Be There.” The song would be shelved for decades as the version she recorded post-signing to Columbia purportedly failed to capture the magic of the original demo. The track would eventually resurface on Mariah’s 2020 compilation The Rarities , subsequently renewing interest in the lore surrounding her earliest demo recordings. “She and Ben started writing amazing, amazing stuff,” Toland recalls. “So, at that point, I started helping with the arrangements and production and the recording. Basically, I recorded all the vocals.” This was a period that marked a pivotal shift between analog recording techniques and the eventual digital norms of the incoming ’90s. Toland and Margulies had been band guys, primarily, so the shift to electronic production methods required some trial and error. “We embraced that technology and killed ourselves,” Toland
remembers. “Technology is our friend now, but boy, in those early days…oof!” This harnessing of new technology is perhaps most apparent on an early version of “Prisoner,” later the penultimate track on Mariah Carey . An uptempo pop track that sits comfortably in the space between new jack swing and Latin freestyle, it might’ve been equally at home on an album by Paula Abdul, Taylor Dayne, or Bobby Brown. Among the other tracks recorded at this time were early versions of “Vision of Love,” “Someday,” “Vanishing,” and “All in Your Mind,” each of which would be re-recorded and included on Mariah’s 1990 debut. While Toland and Margulies brought experience and technical know-how, Mariah wasn’t just following their lead and relying on them to progress her ideas—she was shaping the music herself. “As schooled and experienced as I was, I didn’t need to coach her in any shape or form,” Toland recalls. “She was an incredible pro [with] amazing vision and a sensitivity to vocal production which was very high level.” Mariah might have arrived at Bedworks with professional chops, but, as the trio spent more time in the studio together, her talents continued springing forth. “When you’re that age and have acumen and talent, you grow really quickly,” Toland says. “I mean, she did have wonderful command and technique. Great pitch and rhythm. But she grew so much over those couple of years that we were together. It was fascinating to watch. Really fascinating to watch.” Toland recalls one particular session where he first observed Mariah ascending into the whistle register, the vocal flex that would
98 WaxPoetics
( top ) Ben Margulies, as seen on the April 1994 cover of Songwriters Musepaper , a Los Angeles-based trade journal.
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