Anyone who knows me know that I love the esoteric, confusing and complicated aspects of pop music's greatest artists. When a Garth Brooks goes on a detour to become Chris Gaines? I'm there.

So, for decades, I've been a bit obsessed with Mariah Carey's long-lost side project Someone's Ugly Daughter, which she created under the name "Chick", as a grunge-influenced emotional release from the stresses she was under during the creation of her 1995 album Daydream. A not-very-veiled dig at the frustrations she had with her then-husband and label head Tommy Mottola, the songs themselves have been circulating amongst fans for years, with lead vocals from Clarissa Dane, Mariah's friend and collaborator on the project. (Mariah herself was barred from taking lead on the project due to her commitments to Sony at the time.)

The Daughter project came to much higher visibility, though, after Mariah mentioned it in her (incredible! highly recommended!) memoir "The Meaning of Mariah Carey", which came out in 2020. The book taught a lot of people who saw Mariah as primarily a pop artist or merely a remarkable vocalist that she's a truly gifted songwriter, and the breadth of her catalog was exemplified by the revelation to many more casual fans that she had things like an entire Hole-inspired grunge album sitting unreleased in her vault.

But at long last, we're seeing Mariah finally acknowledge this hidden part of her catalog in the promotional tour for her latest record, Here For It All. After a fan flashed a (presumably homemade?) album cover for Daughter at an event, Mariah began to talk about the record, and even let the crowd listen to one of the best songs on the record, "Love Is A Scam".

It's hard to imagine, at the same moment that "Always Be My Baby" was still all over the radio, and when she was recording "Fantasy", that Mariah was listening to acts like Garbage and recording this harder-edged album at night, art-directing an album cover featuring a dead cockroach on the front. But I do have a theory that nearly all great pop artists have at least one great alter ego hiding inside them, and perhaps Chick is that one for Mariah. I'm hoping this belated acknowledgment of the Someone's Ugly Daughter record is a major step towards its eventual, long-overdue, release.