One thing we’ve discovered about Mariah Carey this week is that she has a lot more interesting stuff in her closet than we previously thought.
Currently on the promo trail for her new album, Here For It All, on Monday night she was discussing her unreleased mid-1990s ‘grunge’ album with Jimmy Fallon. Now, she’s revealed that there’s an unreleased collab with Michael Jackson that hasn’t yet seen light of day.
Carey was talking on Watch What Happens with Andy Cohen on Wednesday when a question came in from a viewer about the duet. “There is an issue with his estate,” the singer explained, before intimating that said estate is planning some kind of Jackson retrospective. “They’re doing something really huge for him, Michael, and you know this is a song that would ‘usurp’ the situation.”
Carey said of the song: “I love it. I’m so upset that it’s not coming out on this album. Like, every time I would play it for somebody, they’d be like ‘Wow.’ It’s one of his classics. I sang along to it and did new background vocals.”
“If someone just calls his management and tells them we want to hear this!” she pleaded.
During the interview there was no mention of the track’s title. Nor, for that matter, the elephant in the room, which both Carey and Cohen nimbly tiptoed around - namely the question of whether an artist such as Mariah would (or should) actually want to release a collaboration with Jackson, who faced allegations of abuse of minors in the 2019 documentary, Leaving Neverland.
But the Michael Jackson heritage industry continues to do good business. Indeed, a second jukebox musical on Jackson’s life, MJ, continues to play to sell out crowds around the world. Thriller was reissued in a 40th anniversary edition in 2022 and, if what Carey suggests is true, there’s a “huge” retrospective of some description coming out soon, too.
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