Born on March 27, 1970 in Huntington, New York, to father Alfred Roy Carey and mother Patricia Carey, Mariah Carey was destined for greatness from the beginning. Mariah received her name from her mother’s favorite song, “They Call the Wind Maria.” After her parents divorced at the age of three, Mariah lived with her mother. Her mother, Patricia Carey, was a vocal coach and opera singer who ultimately was Mariah’s inspiration to sing. In 1972, when Mariah was only two years old, Patricia discovered Mariah’s talent when she began imitating her operatic singing (Biography, 4). “From the time Mariah was a tiny girl, she sang true pitch. She was able to hear a sound and duplicate it exactly,” her mother told People in 1993. According to Vogue, Mariah attended one of her mother’s rehearsals for Verdi’s Rigoletto and her mother missed her cue, but Mariah did not. She able to sing it in Italian at exactly the right point. Astonishingly, Mariah was not even three yet. From then on, Patricia began coaching Mariah and at the age of four, she was already getting singing lessons and singing at her brother’s radio station.

As Mariah Carey matured, her natural talent for singing grew even stronger. During elementary school, Carey naturally excelled in subjects that she loved, such as music, art, and literature, but did not enjoy other subjects. In high school, she began writing poems and adding melodies to them, thus starting her career as a singer-songwriter. As she continued to grow as a singer, she began demonstrating usage of the whistle register, and through training her mother taught her how to master and control it. At fifteen, she began writing songs with Gavin Christopher, an aspiring singer/songwriter/producer, and they began creating songs together in the basement of his father’s store during her senior year of high school. After high school, Carey moved to Manhattan, where she worked various jobs and continued to work on her music. During this time, she completed a four-song demo and attempted to pass it to music labels but was unsuccessful in her efforts. However, shortly after these attempts she was introduced to rising pop singer Brenda K. Starr and her life was forever changed.