Mariah Carey recently spoke with Jennifer Hudson on her daytime talk show The Jennifer Hudson Show about her friendship with Prince, how he helped her through a rough time in her life, his sage music advice, and most notably, her regret over not finishing a song with him before he passed in 2016. According to Carey, she never finished the track because she was nervous.
When asked if she and Prince ever considered writing a song together, Carey declared, “It’s a long story,” but with a little prompting from Hudson, she began to share with the audience. “So I went to [Prince’s home and studio] Paisley Park,” she started, “and I was there with an idea to sample ‘Nasty Girl’ by Vanity, which he wrote … He didn’t think that was a great idea because he really didn’t like people sampling other people’s songs. He would tell you ‘go do your own version of it.’ And at that time I had done a lot of records based on samples, so I was like, ‘oh, you don’t like the idea,’” she laughed.
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“And then he was like, ‘well what about something else,’” Carey continued, “because I don’t think he had a lot of faith in … artists that were maybe not proven, like he didn’t know what really went on in the studio.”
Carey touched on the deceit and manipulation in the music industry like people claiming they had writing credits “just to get the money,” and Hudson agreed.
“So I was like, ‘I have this other little song,’” Carey went on. “It was just a melody, something that I had, and we kind of worked on it … [and] I was so nervous because it was Prince and we were in the studio and I was like ‘come on, this is not real,’” she said of her disbelief at the collaboration. “And he was like, ‘ok well finish,’ because I was like ‘I just kind of want to do a ballad,’ and, I don’t know, it was me being really nervous because it was Prince.”
She then admitted, “We didn’t finish that song, and I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Global Citizen
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