Mariah Carey Is ‘Here For It All’ On New Album

Mariah Carey

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At this point in her three-decade career, Mariah Carey has nothing to prove. The music icon boasts enough awards and number-one singles for an army of artists, not to mention a coveted cultural status as a Christmas fixture every year. Still, her love of music can’t be extinguished, as evidenced by the release of her sixteenth studio album Here For It All, out now.

Here For It All arrives seven years after her last album Caution and was preceded by singles like “Type Dangerous” and the Kehlani and Shenseea collab “Sugar Sweet.” It comes as Carey navigates a difficult grieving process after losing both her mother and sister on the same day last August.

For Carey, the road to the album’s creation and release wasn’t quick or easy. “I was working on this album for so long,” she told The Associated Press, admitting she questioned whether she’d release it at all or what she wanted it to sound like. “And it just became something that I then sort of focused on.”

Those expecting a traditional R&B album from Carey will find a mashup of various sounds that speak to Carey’s established artistry in this chapter of her career. “We were doing all types of different music and I was working with lots of different people,” she recounted. “It just came out that it was an eclectic album that had a lot of different textures to it.”

On “Play This Song,” Carey teams up with hit-making singer Anderson .Paak, with whom she co-wrote other tracks like “In Your Feelings” and “I Won’t Allow It” – a working relationship birthed out of both her and her son’s love for Silk Sonic, .Paak’s Grammy-winning duo with Bruno Mars. Elsewhere, she covers a Paul McCartney and the Wings classic with “My Love.”

She even taps into her faith on “Jesus I Do,” a collaboration with gospel music stalwarts The Clark Sisters. “Since the past few albums that I’ve done, I’ve kind of had to put something spiritual in there because it’s for me, it’s not like a ‘Let me impress this one or that one with this.’ That was, you know, always just for me to really feel like that spiritual side of who I am,” she told AP of the link-up. “It’s definitely almost like a dedication to faith.”

Getting to share a track with the group was an “amazing” pinch-me moment for Carey. “I can’t even tell you how much I was having goosebumps singing along with The Clark Sisters,” she confessed to GQ. “I couldn’t believe it was happening.”

Ultimately, Carey is proud of the project she’s released – and of herself at this stage of her life. “We’re calling it the era of me,” she quipped to AP. For evidence of that attitude, look no further than “Confetti & Champagne”: “Cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers / To me, not you, just me / That confetti and champagne / Clink, clink, clink, pow / Look at me now.”