It was a major pop-culture moment that Whitney and I were collaborating, but I was personally so happy we did because we ended up having a wonderful time together. Everybody wanted to pit us against each other in some “battle of the divas”—a tired but pervasive pathology in music and Hollywood that makes women compete for sales like emotional UFC fighters. This narrative just supports the stereotype of all women being petty and not in control of our feelings, yet totally controllable by the boys in the industry.
Obviously, Whitney was formidable. Who wasn’t inspired by her career, who she was as an artist and as an anointed vocalist?! But we were very different. I loved (and still love) layering the background vocals, writing, producing, and doing behind-the-scenes stuff like that. She was kind of born into it, like a royal singing princess. To us, it never felt like a competition. We complemented each other. We both had our hearts anchored in the Lord, and that was real, even though so much of what was happening around us was surreal. After the initial iciness (built up by outside forces) wore off, we developed a real fondness for each other. She had a marvelous sense of humor. She started using my words and calling me “lamb”—it was just pure fun.
Bobby Brown was around, and I don’t know what else was going on, but that wasn’t my business. I just know we had fun and laughed a lot. Doing the video was great fun too; we had many incredible moments together. Every day we spent together was special, and I’ll always cherish the memory of that time and of all that she left behind. “When You Believe” stands as a testimony to the power of faith and, to me, sisterhood here on earth as it is in heaven.
Rainbow was released the following year and was a very different endeavor than #1’s, which was a compilation album. It was much more involved. For obvious reasons, there was a huge push to get it done, so I wrote and recorded Rainbow in three months. I was desperate to work without distraction. My longtime friend Randy Jackson suggested I check out a very cool and secluded recording studio in Capri (which I love more than any place on Earth). In this paradise tucked in ancient limestone mountains towering out of the Gulf of Naples, I had a lovely little studio apartment that was flooded with sunlight and privacy every morning. I’d sit in a room in the studio filled with candles and creativity and hunker down for hours, just writing and laying down tracks. I wrote by myself and occasionally with the incomparable Terry Lewis, whom I love as a writer, while the Jimmy Jam added his brilliant musicianship. (Together they are responsible for forty-one US top-ten hits.) Without them, the album would not have come together so smoothly. The three of us worked together all the way through “Can’t Take That Away (Mariah’s Theme),” which I brought to Diane Warren, who plucked it out on the piano as I sang the lyrics and melody to the first verse. We wrote the second verse together. That song was actually about the professional and personal situation I was going through:
They can say anything they want to say
Try to bring me down, but I will not allow
Anyone to succeed hanging clouds over me
And they can try hard to make me feel
That I don’t matter at all
But I refuse to falter in what I believe
Or lose faith in my dreams
’Cause there’s
There’s a light in me
That shines brightly
They can try
But they can’t take that away from me
—“Can’t Take That Away (Mariah’s Theme)”
Since I was a child, I had often had to turn to the “light in me / That shines brightly” just to get through, just to survive. So that was a song about many things, but when I wrote it, I was thinking about all that was going on at the time, about Tommy and the many years I had spent under his control. That was my theme—“They can try / But they can’t take that away from me / From me, no, no, no.”
The video (which I produced and paid for), while not the slickest in terms of tricks and production values, was a real change. We shot it in Japan. At the time, it was uncommon to incorporate real fans and user-generated content into videos. It was important for me to center my fans and express how they felt about the songs I was writing about my life for them. We collected a bunch of materials: footage of everyday people, real people who had overcome the odds to accomplish extraordinary things. The video also included superstar champions like Venus and Serena Williams, but mainly people in my life who I cared deeply about, like my nephew Shawn, who, despite being the child of a troubled teenage mother, went on to graduate from Harvard Law, and Da Brat’s grandmother. It showed triumphant moments, emotional moments—and it was real and raw. I wanted to utilize the theme of my core belief that all things are possible. I wanted the video to be a tribute to all the fans who helped me get through everything.
The song didn’t do anything on the charts because the label barely promoted it—and this marked the beginning of their sabotage campaign. But it mattered for the fans. It mattered for the people who needed to hear it. And it matters for me. To this day, I still listen to it every once in a while. I still need it.
Another important song on Rainbow was “Petals.” It was, and still is,
