Behind The Beat: Mariah Carey’s “Vision Of Love”
“My earliest memory is wanting to be a professional singer. I’ve been working toward this goal since I was twelve years old, working with different studio musicians. I went out on my own when I was seventeen — waitressed, coat checked, hostessed and did all the things that people do who are trying to “make it” in show business. After I’d waitressed, at one or two in the morning, I’d work in the studio ’til eight o’clock in the morning writing songs and doing demos with Ben Margulies, my writing partner. I condensed about ten years of hard work into about four.” — Mariah Carey (1991).
On the 15th of May 1990 Mariah Carey’s debut single Vision Of Love would burst onto the airwaves, becoming her first of an astounding 19 hits to reach the summit of the Billboard Hot 100, and signal the emergence of a supremely talented writer and performer who’s influence on shaping the sound of pop and RNB music can’t be understated.
This week we celebrate the pivotal milestone in Carey’s enriching and accomplished career by tracing the genesis of Vision Of Love and it’s development by the artist and her collaborators, originating from a small studio recording to one of the most renowned and influential ballads of the 20th century.
Carey wrote Vision Of Love with writing partner Ben Margulies circa December 1988/January 1989 at his small studio in New York while in the midst of procuring a record deal with label Columbia after her demo tape had impressed studio executives. Mariah would note the particularly ecstatic atmosphere at the time of the recording, “I mean, that was a very good time in my life when I wrote that song, when I recorded that song, that was like — I wrote it right after I got, you know, first got signed — I don’t even think I was signed yet, I just first knew I was going to have a record deal and I recorded it in the back of this wood shed when I was still doing demos in this little studio.”
Carey would begin writing the track alone on a keyboard and with Margulies, the pair would develop the song further. She elaborates on the creative process, “I write the music first and the lyrics second, almost always. Melody comes to me really, really quickly — sometimes when I don’t want it to — like when I’m trying to sleep and I have to get up and record a melody so I don’t forget it. I keep a tape recorder by my bed for this. If I’m cowriting a song, we’ll sit at the piano and I’ll say, ‘This is a chord progression I’m working on’ and we’ll work it out. We’ll bounce ideas off each other, and I’ll take it home and whatever the music makes me feel, that’s what I write about.” As Carey began writing the lyrics, she’d be inspired by the journey to reach this pivotal point in her career, balancing personal and financial struggles with a relentless drive and determination to fulfil her aspirations. On the surface, Vision Of Love has often been interpreted as a traditional love song, however this isn’t the case as Mariah instead reflects on the dream once visualised and now becoming an evident reality.
Treated me kind
Sweet destiny
Carried me through desperation
To the one that was waiting for me
It took so long
Still I believed
Somehow the one that I needed
Would find me eventually
The determination to achieve her goal would be akin to that of an inevitable destiny prophesied at the age of 12 and finally becoming tangent at the age of 20. Mariah elaborates, “The song is very special to me because it encapsulates the story of my dream of becoming a recording artist, although most people interpret it as a love song.”
In the second verse, she highlights the resilience needed to overcome the tribulations she’d endure, turning towards faith and her own inner strength for comfort, a common theme she would explore on a plethora of tracks throughout her career including Make It Happen, Can’t Take That Away (Mariah’s Theme) and Fly Like A Bird, “That song really represents everything in my life. It is a song from the heart.’ Consider the lyrics: ‘Prayed through the nights / Felt so alone / Suffered from alienation / Carried the weight on my own / Had to be strong / So I believed / And now I know I’ve succeeded / In finding the place I conceived’…Well, just because you are young doesn’t mean that you haven’t had a hard life. It’s been difficult for me, moving around so much, having to grow up by myself, basically on my own, my parents divorced. And I always felt kind of different from everyone else in my neighborhoods. I was a different person — ethnically. And sometimes that can be a problem. If you look a certain way everybody goes, ‘White girl,’ and I’d go, ‘No, that’s not what I am.’… ‘You really have to look inside yourself and find your own inner strength, and say ‘I’m proud of what I am and who I am, and I’m just going to be myself.”
It’s speculated that Carey and Margulies wrote Vision Of Love just a week after signing their record deal and it’s not a surprise that such a celebratory song would materialise at this pivotal point. As they recorded the initial demo in Margulies’ small studio, they’d have to accommodate to the equipment that was available. This compromise would lead to some unexpected results as Mariah elaborates, “He had this little studio and I did Vision of Love in there and I sang on a PZM drum mic, which is like, I’m not sure if you’re familiar, but it’s a black drum mic that’s like twenty five dollars and it’s made for flat — to put in a drum, right? But that’s all we had, so it picked up a lot of the harmonics in my voice, so when I was doing those [sings] ahhhh, oooo on those background parts, it really picked up the air. So when I went to do the record, I couldn’t recreate those backgrounds as well as they were on that little crappy studio.”
One of the most incredible aspects of Carey’s discography is her supreme vocal technique and Vision Of Love would be a testament to this incomparable ability. Mariah’s use of melisma flows organically as each vocal run permeates with effortless strength, adding to the transcendent quality of the lyrical content coupled with her incredible 5 octave range and that iconic whistle register. While the initial demo of the track would be recorded and produced in New York, Carey would at the request of her label meet with producer and musician Rhett Lawrence in Los Angeles to discuss working on songs for her forthcoming debut album in development. Lawrence would recall when he first heard Carey’s voice, “I literally got goose bumps on my arms when I heard her sing. I couldn’t believe the power and maturity in her voice.”
Mariah first and foremost valued autonomy as an artist and was apprehensive at first to outside influence, understandable given her creative circle for the past three years had been shared primarily just with Margulies. He would recollect, “We worked together for a three-year period developing most of the songs on the first album. She had the ability just to hear things in the air and to start developing songs out of them. Often I would sit down and start playing something, and from the feel of a chord, she would start singing melody lines and coming up with a concept.” Carey recalls a similar sentiment, “I didn’t know that I was producing, but I was producing — suggesting that the piano part be more like this, changing the sound of the synthesizer. I thought he was producing because he was the man.” The demo tape that would find it’s way to executives from Warner Brothers and eventually Tommy Mottola would include tracks recorded by the pair during this three year period including Alone In Love among others developed further for Carey’s debut album.
Mariah would concede to outside input however and worked with producers appointed by the label as she notes, “They did put me with different producers that they wanted to have me work with, and this being the first album, I took a certain amount of direction from the record company. You know, they are taking a chance.” Alongside Lawrence, they would bring in Ric Wake and Narada Michael Walden to collaborate with Carey and Margulies on the album. Walden had previously worked with a number of artists including Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston. He would reflect on how this collaboration came about, “I got a phone call from Tommy Mottola (then Sony Music President). He had just found Mariah and he was so excited by her. He sent me a cassette and her photo. I could tell she was a great singer. I said, “Okay, so what do you want me to do?” And he said, “I want you to give us a hit.” Then I suggested we meet, and just take it from there. So I flew to New York and I met with Mariah, and I was kind of taken by how shy she was. She was very sincere and sweet, but soft-spoken and shy. It’s not like the Mariah you see now…all full bloom. So I said, “Let’s just go get a (studio) room — we’ll just get a piano, a synthesizer, a drum machine and some microphones. Let’s see what we can write.” And we went to the studio, and we wrote four songs the first time — out came four songs.”
Reflecting on the sessions years later, Mariah would be somewhat critical of the contributions made by outside producers on the album, “I didn’t get credit — even on my first album, [in which] some of the songs were exactly the same productions I did on my demos, and these big producers would come in and just tweak a few things.”
When Lawrence first heard the demo of Vision Of Love in Los Angeles, he was enthusiastic about the developing track but felt it needed some further work in order to be fit for release on the album. Alongside Carey and Margulies, the trio would change the tempo, remove what was described as a ”fifties sort of shuffle” and bring in session musicians to add some extra instrumentation including bass and guitars performed by Marcus Miller and Jimmy Rip respectively. The result would be a glossy, doo-wop style ballad evoking a retro feel with the use of floating keys played by Lawrence, subtle guitar riffs and prominent percussion, including finger snaps. Carey would also re-record her lead vocals, performing the captivating vocals that would find their place on the finished track, matching the intensity of the sonic landscape coupled with luscious and warm background vocals, a staple of Carey’s catalogue. The intensity in her vocals escalate with each verse and culminate in a passionate explosion during the bridge and outro with a number of ad libbed vocal runs, a representation of both the struggle and success conveyed by the lyrical content. Carey would reveal that some of the vocals recorded on the PZM drum mic for the demo would be utilised on the finished cut, therefore maintaining some elements of the early version, “We ended up using a lot of that, even the high note is from that PZM drum mic. Like, I might, just for experimentation go and try and sing in to one of those mics to see what it sounds like, ’cause it picked up certain qualities.”
Walden would also be brought in to work on the track late in it’s development after the promising results of I Don’t Wanna Cry made with Carey in earlier sessions, “She wrote a killer lyric in just one day. So we just got together like peanut butter and jelly. We kind of bonded, and that’s how “I Don’t Wanna Cry” happened and it became a number one record. And once the label heard the song, they also had me work on (production of the hit) “Vision of Love” and “There’s Got to be a Way” (from her debut album, Mariah Carey). The extent of Walden’s contribution to the track is unknown as it had been worked on extensively by Carey, Margulies and later Lawrence before Narada was brought into the fold.
While the original demo of Vision Of Love has not surfaced, it is said to be noticeably more stripped down and raw, a product of the relatively basic studio where it was initially conceived and Carey’s own preference for a more natural and bare production. In a 1999 interview, Mariah described the demo as being superior to the released version and discussed the overproduction she felt was evident on a number of tracks on her debut album, “My demos were much edgier than my albums became. I wish I could have gone back to the essence of what those records were when they were demos. Even the demos that I was working on with Ben. When it became time to work on the first album everyone was so obsessed about competing with these other records and to produce them up. Any producer I was supposed to work with had to be that much smarter than me. At that point I was so much younger than everybody else involved in putting my record together. And I felt like I was so much more in tune with what was really going on in terms of music. For me a lot of that edge was… honed. They smoothed it, honed it and toned it because it worked better for mass appeal.”
Carey would note in a 1991 interview how this experience would shape her next release, “My first album was a lot of experimentation. I was kind of scattered in a way. I had most of the songs when I signed my record deal, but it was so overwhelming for me to go from being in this tiny studio in the back of a woodshed up to working in these incredibly vast, big time studios. It was a big transition and I think that on the next album I’ll have more of a total picture mapped out before I go into the studio — I’ll have everything written and know exactly who’s going to co-produce with me.”
With her next studio album Emotions, Mariah scaled back the production with songs largely influenced by artists who had inspired her, “I wanted ‘Emotions’ to be more sparsely produced than the first one,” she continued, “and for the most part it is. I also wanted to use the influences of all the music I loved, like Motown stuff and Stevie Wonder. I felt the uptempo songs were a little over produced on the first record.”
Furthermore, Carey’s need to express the other elements of her craft including ventures into more urban sounds would be an ongoing point of contention with the record label as they avoided promotion of the more RNB inspired tracks in an attempt to pigeon her into a specific market. Perhaps the most transparent and telling example of this interplay came from head of Columbia Don Ienner who stated, “For this particular time, she is my number one priority. We don’t look at her as a dance-pop artist. We look at her as a franchise.”
As Mariah’s career progressed, other dimensions of her musicality would become evident as she emancipated herself from the control of label executives. Carey would perform Vision Of Love on a number of talk shows in 1990 including GMA where often she’d be accompanied by just a piano and background singers, stripping down the production and more reminiscent of her original intention with the track, in similar vein to the sparse production on the incredible ballad Vanishing.
Carey was unsure of whether the track would be a commercial success as it was different from much of the music dominating the charts during this time, “I never expected this song to be a big hit, because it was so different than the songs that were popular in that time period… ‘it isn’t hip-hop music, it isn’t house music, and it isn’t rap.” Lawrence recalled a superstar in the making during these sessions, “Thankfully, I was able to be around at the start of Mariah Carey, Kelly Clarkson and The Black Eyed Peas’ careers. I knew they will be big even in the beginning.”
Vision Of Love was released as the first single from Carey’s eponymous debut LP and approximately three weeks after, the album followed. Mariah was deemed a “high priority artist” by Columbia and a strategic marketing plan was put in place to ensure that the artist would reach as many listeners as possible. Jane Berk who had been a director of marketing at CBS records at the time noted, “We had numerous, numerous meetings about Mariah way in advance of the album’s release. It was about carefully planting seeds in the industry and nurturing their development at every stage. It was very strategically planned. We went out on a limb and it was worth taking the risk.”
In addition to talk show performances, a video would be shot for the song, which failed to impress executives at Columbia, and another was commissioned and placed on heavy rotation at MTV, directed by Andy Morahan and becoming the iconic video we all know today. Vision Of Love entered the US Billboard 100 at number 73 before steadily climbing the charts in the coming weeks, eventually hitting the top spot for four weeks, making it Carey’s first of a record 19 number one singles. The song would be a worldwide commercial success attaining platinum sales in the US and reaching number one in various territories including Canada and New Zealand. While the release of Vision Of Love would mark the beginning of Carey’s domination on the charts, more importantly would be it’s significant influence on shaping the sound of RNB and pop music to come as well as inspiring a plethora of upcoming successful vocalists and artists. Kelly Clarkson would recall seeing Carey perform the song on Arsenio Hall as a pivotal moment in shaping her career course, Beyonce would state in an interview, “‘Vision of Love’ was one of the first songs I heard when I was a kid where I heard all of these riffs and I was like, ‘How does she do that?’… And that’s kind of when I started trying it and it’s something that I love to do in my music, but she completely inspired me.”
The list of artists inspired by Carey and Vision Of Love is extensive, ranging from Grimes to Rihanna, a testament to how her songwriting and vocal technique has continued to influence not only pop and RNB acts but also artists in urban genres. Carey would elaborate further in a 1999 interview, “I was really surprised it went anywhere in pop, because ‘Vision’ was very raw, very R&B,” Carey says. “A lot of rap artists I’ve worked with mention ‘Vision of Love’ as a song that really meant something to them. It was a ballad, but I think it showed how rooted I am in urban music.”
The track would also be a critical success, featured in a number of publications as one of the most iconic tracks of the 1990s. At the time of it’s release it would also be nominated for a number of awards including Grammys and Soul Train Awards. Carey would win for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 1991 Grammys, one of three nominations for the track.
Vision Of Love will forever hold resonance as the introduction of Mariah Carey to the worldwide public sphere, the passionate songwriter and consummate performer with the otherworldly voice and vocal range as rich and expansive as her illustrious discography. Carey’s ballads would continue to evolve and develop as she took further creative control and explored heavier subject matter in her lyrics, but Vision Of Love is everything an artist could hope to achieve with a debut single.
Read our article on the making of Mariah Carey’s 1993 album, Music Box here:
Mariah Carey: The Songwriter With A Music Box
Read our article on the making of Mariah Carey’s 1999 album, Rainbow here:
Mariah Carey’s Rainbow: 20th Anniversary Celebration
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Citations:
Fred Bronson “The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits”, 2003 | PARIAH CAREY — NEW ALBUM, NEW ATTITUDE — BUT MARIAH’S STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS by Dan Aquilante, April 10, 2005 | The Gavin Report (US) February 8, 1991. Text by Dave Sholin. | POP MUSIC; The Pop-Gospel According To Mariah Carey By Stephen Holden Sept. 15, 1991 | The Philadelphia Inquirer (US) December 2, 1993. Text by Tom Moon | American Record Producer Rhett Lawrence on Morissette: ‘She’s Definitely a Future Legend’ — February 28, 2018. Wish 1075 | Mariah Carey Revisited: The Unauthorized Biography By Chris Nickson | Special Interview with Narada Michael Walden, Grammy-Winning Hit Producer & Songwriter for Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin and Mariah Carey — Dale Kawashima: May 25, 2017 | “Not Another White Girl Trying to Sing Black” by Lynn Norment: Ebony Magazine, March 1991
