1995: Mariah Carey, Daydream
By Wes Matthews
All it takes is one summer to discover the precise language for my longing. All it takes is the relentless sprawl of sunlight, the warm and gentle grasses of my backyard. As I lie there, prepared to gaze into whatever adorned sky the day has to offer, a certain sense of wonder visits me—wonder that is bound to possibilities that are far-fetched, but still feel like familiar realities. This is an emotional arc that occupies my mind over and over, keeping me company even when it feels like the world is rapidly moving, each moment spinning around an axis of the last.
Mariah Carey’s 1995 album Daydream is music with an animated whim behind it, and it was the album that led me to take on a whole new relationship with listening—both to music and my inner self. At its core, it is a unique example of music being the device through which we translate and engage all the little worlds that we hold within ourselves, the dreams and reveries that we never speak of but never forget. Daydream also serves as a departure from Carey’s previous sounds, as she experiments more consistently with mature hip hop and R&B grooves over the teen-pop balladry that had become her signature. The album, in this sense, marks the turning point in Carey’s career when she began exerting creative control over her own sound and overall direction. Much of the initial draw of the album for me is its air of confidence; this album is an artist offering her vulnerability, backed by a silent self-possession that seeps its way into the music throughout.
Daydream ripples with an imagery that only desire can evoke, dedicated to the thrill of endless passion. Carey’s images are both precise and open-ended, which I suppose is in the very nature of dreams. At the heart of “Melt Away,” she sings: “Maybe I could melt away in your arms / you and me in a cloud of reverie / spin around inside my head unendingly / thoughts run wild as I sit and rhapsodize / pretty pictures of what I’d do if you were mine.” In “Forever,” she turns her yearning into a promise: “if you should ever need me / unfailingly, I will return to your arms.” Carey extends her daydreams as invitations into the arena of true love, dancing along the line between what is and what could be. The whole album is teeming with an urgency to not only cherish love, but to make it as meaningful as possible by envisioning it at its best.
She often returns to this “enchanted getaway” image. Each time it comes up, it takes on a slightly new form. The songs bridge into one another in this way, as separate visions with overlapping emotions. In the “Always Be My Baby” music video, Carey joyfully sways from a tire swing suspended over a lake, shimmering with the night’s reflection. Inter-cuts show two young lovers escaping with each other and running freely into the night. In the “Fantasy” video, she coasts through an amusement park on roller skates, smiling along to the hook’s memorable words: “sweet, sweet fantasy baby / when I close my eyes, you come and you take me.” I get the sense that every scene comes from Mariah herself, at her most candid. As she peers at the camera, she seems more interested in enjoying what she is doing than in lip synching the lyrics. She seems cool and perfectly unbothered, a hard feat to reach for an artist of her stature.
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In my life, daydreaming has not only been a form of escapism, but also a way to uncover all the inner realities that make up my emotional landscape. Whenever called upon, it has been a long hall with an exit on one end and a new and mysterious entrance on the other. In crossing over, I have been able to shed many of my daily anxieties and engage my heart’s true desire. One of the things I love most about daydreaming is that it is accessible at any given or random moment. In this sense, it feels very much stitched into the routine of living as a way to embody those things that are hard to experience on a day-to-day basis, but are still yearned for—love, awe, freedom, and so on. Daydreaming isn’t a distraction so much as it is a subversion of the material world for the sake of another one that feels perhaps even more real and worthwhile, always open to those who are searching for something to believe in.
When I was 16 and it was the summertime, Daydream was a kind of soundtrack for the dog days passing, slowly taking my youthful innocence as a sacrifice. Each song became attached to my dreamscape in a very specific way. “Fantasy” while lying in the yard thinking about a certain summer crush, or “Underneath the Stars” while spellbound by July’s night skies, vaulting into a state of wonder at how vast the universe is, filled with appreciation that I get to have a place in it. Daydream revealed to me this truth: what I had been longing for was not a way out, but a way beyond—any way to rise beyond the forces of the mundane, to trapeze into a heartspun moment filled with all the beautiful things I could imagine. I was trying to feel weightless, and to feel like I could level a distance between myself and the heartache of my world. It is always rewarding to glean optimism from the refuge that you create for yourself, especially in the most fleeting pockets of time. So in Daydream, I instantly found a chemistry between what it is I wanted to feel and what Carey so vividly described: a safety. Not one that I have to spend years seeking out, but one that has always lived inside me. At the time, I needed this reminder that there will always be space inside of me to hold things other than anger or sadness, that there’s no shame in exploring whatever it is I have stowed away.
Set on her fate, Daydream shows Carey unafraid to express her form of desire as the sum of its parts, even when those parts are otherworldly or out-of-reach. It is an album daring enough to look into the face of the future, only to find that it is a face that we can only begin to imagine for ourselves by looking inward. For me, Carey was the first to light the path I had to travel in order to forge my life to imagined possibility, not just live it passively. That is the gift of daydreaming: it is a kind of simple creation that does not rely on reality as a guide; it is wholly shaped by our heart and mind’s ebb-and-flow, and so it is uniquely ours. Sometimes, I feel like it’s all I have and, somehow, it’s always enough.
Wes Matthews is a Detroit-born, Philadelphia-based poet and essayist. Wes served as the 2018-19 Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate and is currently working on a forthcoming chapbook. He makes music with rap collective Critical Theory, available on all streaming platforms.