There are tribute nights, and then there are moments that quietly rewrite pop history in real time.
At the 2026 MusiCares Person of the Year ceremony in Los Angeles, Mariah Carey sat through the kind of celebration usually reserved for institutions rather than human beings. Adam Lambert, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Kesha, Busta Rhymes, all lining up to reframe songs the world already thought it understood. And then Foo Fighters and Taylor Momsen walked out and detonated a time capsule nobody was sure still existed.
For the first time ever, two tracks from Carey’s long-buried 1995 alt-rock project Someone’s Ugly Daughter, originally released under the band name Chick, were performed live. The songs, Love Is a Scam and Demented, sounded less like curios and more like proof that an entire parallel Mariah Carey career has been sitting in a locked drawer for three decades.
Carey, visibly moved, addressed the room earlier in the evening with the sort of sincerity that only arrives after surviving several lifetimes inside one career:
“When I was a little girl scribbling lyrics in my notebook late at night, I could only dream of someone hearing those words and singing them,” she said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd be here with all these magnificent artists singing my songs back to me, infusing them with their own artistry and giving them all new life. This has given me life.”
The twist, of course, is that the songs Momsen and Foo Fighters chose weren’t the diamond-polished pop standards. They were the raw, sarcastic, distortion-chewed anthems Carey wrote in secret while simultaneously crafting Daydream, one of the defining mainstream records of the ’90s.
In her 2020 memoir, Carey explained what was happening behind the scenes at the time:
“I was exploring my musical range, but I was also filled with rage,” she wrote. “It’s always been a challenge for me to acknowledge and express anger. My personal life was suffocating during Daydream, and I was in desperate need of release.”
She described being fascinated by the scrappy authenticity of the era’s alternative voices:
“I was playing with the style of the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time,” Carey recalled. “You know the ones who seemed to be so carefree with their feelings and their image… I wanted to break free, let loose, and express my misery, but I also wanted to laugh.”
The label did not laugh.
When Sony, then run by Carey’s husband Tommy Mottola, caught wind of the project, the verdict was swift. The album, deemed “irreverent, raw, and urgent,” was considered a threat to the immaculate Mariah brand. As a compromise, Carey had a friend, Clarissa Dane, re-record the vocals. The record slipped out with no promotion and zero acknowledgement of who actually wrote it.
Decades later, it took a voicemail from Pat Smear to begin correcting that erasure.
“Pat Smear left me a voicemail and said, ‘I have the weirdest request and it involves Mariah Carey. You have to call me’,” Momsen told Vulture.
“I hadn’t listened to the songs or looked into them further. So Pat tells me, ‘Let me send you what we want to do and get back to me. We should do this.’ I listened and I was like, Oh yeah, I can totally rock these.”
Carey has since regained possession of the original mixes and has hinted at releasing them properly. Momsen, now effectively the album’s first public champion, believes the moment is right.
“The world would really love it,” she said. “Maybe now that we’ve debuted the songs and gotten them a little more visibility, it’ll encourage her team to finally pull the trigger.”
And then the line that sums up the entire surreal journey:
“She’s so fantastic and iconic. To have the blessing of someone who’s so judgmental of covers feels great.”
Judgmental in the best possible way. Protective. Precise. A perfectionist who once had to hide her own anger behind someone else’s voice, now watching that anger roar back to life with a full PA and a room full of witnesses.
Not a novelty. Not a footnote. A second history, finally allowed to exist in the first one.
