Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey is an American singer-songwriter and producer whose three-decade career has made her one of the bestselling music artists of all time, with over 220 million records sold worldwide. She was born Mariah Carey on March 27, 1970, in Huntington, Long Island, New York. Her father was a Black Venezuelan-American aeronautical engineer, and her mother was an Irish-American opera singer. Her parents divorced when she was three. She grew up in a series of Long Island towns and was identified as a vocal prodigy from childhood.

Her career-launching break came in 1988 when she handed her demo tape to Sony Music executive Tommy Mottola at a music-industry event. Mottola signed her immediately, and her 1990 self-titled debut album Mariah Carey produced four consecutive #1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 — "Vision of Love," "Love Takes Time," "Someday," and "I Don't Wanna Cry." This four-number-one debut made Carey the first new artist ever to achieve four consecutive #1 singles from a debut album. She married Tommy Mottola in 1993 (the marriage lasted until 1998).

Her commercial peak came in the mid- and late-1990s with the albums Music Box (1993), Daydream (1995), and Butterfly (1997). The 1995 single "Fantasy" — and her unprecedented duet collaboration with the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan's Ol' Dirty Bastard on the "Fantasy (Bad Boy Remix)" — became one of the moments of late-1990s American R&B/hip-hop fusion.

Her 1994 holiday song "All I Want for Christmas Is You" — co-written with Walter Afanasieff — has continuously dominated American Christmas-music airplay for over 30 years and is now the bestselling holiday single in modern music history. The song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in December 2019 — 25 years after its 1994 release. Carey's five-octave vocal range, her whistle register (one of the highest vocal registers in popular music), and her continuous American chart presence have made her one of the most-iconic American R&B and pop singers of her generation. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2024.

Her name Mariah is from the Hebrew Marja meaning "bitter" or "beloved," a phonetic variant of Mary. Mariah has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.