03/2017


Mariah Carey was unfazed by the chaos that surrounded her inside her secluded Beverly Hills estate.

A warmly decorated sitting room was on a recent afternoon being turned into a set as the singer sat in a plush, oversized chair twirling a diamond butterfly ring while a production crew worked around her.

The 46-year-old singer-songwriter is used to this, having spent a chunk of the past year trailed by cameras for “Mariah’s World,” her over-the-top documentary series that recently concluded and proved the superstar — one of pop’s most successful artists with a career spanning nearly three decades — doesn’t take herself too seriously.

But all of the bustle isn’t for a show or a new music video. Instead, the star is doing a day of press for an upcoming tour, a trek she’s squeezing around her ongoing residency in Las Vegas as well as the release of “I Don’t,” her first single in two years.

It’s the first time she’s spoken to reporters since a disastrous technical mishap turned her performance on New Year's Eve into a viral moment that caused the singer to go on a break from media. After sending the crew and her handlers out of the room, Carey is ready to talk.

There was much controversy with your New Year’s Eve performance. What happened?

The whole thing was messed up. If I can’t hear the music, I can’t sing to it. And when there’s no monitor in your ear or if they are not working properly and certainly if the mike is off, I can’t make it work. I’m not a technician. I can’t sit on the bus and figure out all the subtleties of how to make this thing work and also be on the stage. Someone should have walked me off stage and they should have cut to commercial. That would have been the appropriate thing to do. But no, they stood there and let that nonsense happen.

You need to be able to hear yourself. If that’s gone, then the only thing you can hear is the audience and they hear it with the delay. So they are hearing it to a different beat than what everyone onstage is hearing it. It’s a couple of seconds delay. From my perspective, I can’t do anything. There was absolutely nothing I could do at that moment. And no one is coming to save me.

There’s always been a great deal of criticism toward you whenever you’ve had an onstage misstep while other performers are embraced for their mistakes. Why?

I don’t want to sound like — to quote my own song — a pity party of the year. But I would like to know.

I have a few theories. I’m just not sure that everybody would understand. I think to some people, I’m a nebulous person -- ambiguous, and they don't know how to categorize me and that scares some people. That’s what I feel. And it’s always something that’s followed me. Also, I may be perceived as somewhat over-the-top.

Then again you look at other artists and they do whatever they want — and I would have added two more words to that sentence. But when it comes to me it’s, “Oh well, she’s not allowed.” Maybe it’s just too difficult to give me a break for some people.

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