Daydream, 1995
Daydream is the fifth album of Mariah Carey released back in 1995. It's her fourth non-holiday release and her first largely original material since 1993's Music Box. The album is filled with R&B confections not too different from her earlier music, but more varied than ever.
It opens with lead single "Fantasy," a dance number that pairs a sample of Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" with new melodies of Carey's own. It's sugary sweet; I like how the lyrics actually go along with the title of the album. It's a fantasy, a daydream of sorts, of someone peculiar and perhaps drool-worthy coming to fulfill the prophecy of a dream lover. Quite a rapturous feeling indeed. "Underneath the Stars," the second track, follows with yet another fantasy. Or maybe it's a memory of a not so distant past this time. If the first song continues the trend of Mimi's 90's upbeat lead singles bar "Vision of Love," this song definitely breaks the trend of her second track being a ballad. Although, "All I Want for Christmas for You" technically had done it first a year prior (see: Merry Christmas, 1994). An R&B song just as sweet as candy, the song fits well in the daydreaming narrative she's got going on.
Next song(s) are ballads. Who says she outmoded them? Never! "One Sweet Day," a song about overcoming grief and loss, while "Open Arms" is a cover of Journey's song about opening your arms to embrace someone new. She sung both songs really well and glide over the melodies as smooth as silk. The addition of Boyz II Men on the former also makes it sound more dynamic and less monotonous. A bop fest that is "Always Be My Baby" then beautifully adorns the album with sweet sweet melodies, baby. The songwriting is witty and the singing is undeniably great. One of the most praise-worthy things that Carey does with her voice is that she sings with every word pronounced loud and clear even on songs which are meant to sound stylishly mumbly or slurry. So, every syllables in this song and many others can be heard very well and amazingly never gets in the way of her vocal performance.
Ballads aplenty follow suit. A gospel-inspired ballad (a tradition of hers at this point) titled "I Am Free" details the feeling of being free and feeling it as you spread your wings like a bird or, rather, a butterfly soaring through the vast sky up above. Either those or feeling free like a former inmate of Alcatraz prison. Another one follows after, "When I Saw You," which describes the feeling of a woman in love seemingly for the first time. The attraction is so strong that it petrifies the protagonist, rendering her unable to breathe. Somebody give her a CPR, quick!
Then, the last half of the album takes an interesting turn. A series of ballads, but not quite so, fill up the tracklist. "Long Ago," which is more hip-hop than pop, "Melt Away" which is R&B and soul, plus "Forever" that wouldn't sound out of place in any of her previous albums, and yet it would. All three songs have this smoothness particularly in the way Carey sings them that wasn't there in the previous four albums. If early on, she focused on sounding big and belty and even growled on some songs, here she no longer does it. Instead of belting high notes like they're the top of a high mountain in need of climbing, here she takes whichever note she's currently on and swings it right to the top. I don't know if that makes sense to you but it does to me.
The album ends on two particular songs that actually stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard them. The first being an 'interlude' which reprises "Fantasy" with house music production. It sounds better than you would imagine. What makes it unique, however, is how smartly she uses it to tie up the daydream concept she's been using. It was all a fantasy from the first song to the eleventh. It turns out that this whole time, we've been listening to someone so miserable in her real life that she had no choice but to dissociate a moment to create a pocket dream world where she could experience falling in love, falling out of love, falling in love again and again, and so on and so forth. It's a genius...of love? Mind? Blown! "Looking In" ends the album for real this time and, honestly, it's an apt ending for this chapter of the book of Mariah Carey.
If everything she's been presenting since 1990 had been a farce even to herself, it only adds to the charm of her as a songwriter. If it hadn't been, then someone should really get her away from wherever she was and place her in a safer house filled with actual love, warmth, cuddles and kisses, and a drizzle of honey. Plus a bundle of butterflies. Huh.
Love, Daud.
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