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In person, though, Carey is all smiles and adolescent mannerisms. Her conversation is sprinkled with vague, teeny-bopperish adjectives: bad things are "weird"; good things are "real." Ol' Dirty Bastard--a hard-core rapper who appears on a remix of her new single, Fantasy--is "real, the most real you can get." Her sister's troubles, she says in response to a question, are "weird." Later she is more forthcoming, though not especially enlightening: "I haven't spoken to her in a long time, but I hope she's [well]," she says. "People don't realize we're all human beings, and when they take your personal nightmares and make them into public ones, it's very difficult. But everything seems to have worked itself out."
Carey is equally guarded about her well-publicized marriage to record exec Mottola--except to suggest that there is something of a generation gap in their musical tastes. Mottola, 45, would rather she record soft, palatable ballads, she says; Carey favors songs that are "urban and younger." But not to worry: "As far as music goes, we're pretty much in synch," she asserts. "We have a great relationship, and like anyone, we have to work things through."
Carey is more animated on the subject of race. She complains that the press and the public seem "obsessed" with her racial identity. "I view myself as a human being," she says with a sigh. "My father's Venezuelan and black, my mother's Irish, and I consider myself to be a combination of all those things. To say I'm only [one or the other] would be negating the other things that I am." Although Carey likes to champion her multicultural heritage in conversation, she often fails to do so through her music, which, up to now, has been been mostly bland and generic. Whether there are more colors in Carey's musical palette is still undetermined. But the classy Daydream might just be her first step toward a more fulfilling, multihued musical future.