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ABC/Heidi GutmanFor Mariah Carey, it’s always “music first” — and as far as career strategy is concerned, she’d rather leave that to someone else.
She tells V magazine, “In the music business, if you care about the Grammys and submitting your stuff before a certain time frame, you want a single out in the summer, and then you want to have your record [out] before the Grammys [consideration] deadline, which has changed. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
“I mean, I have five Grammys. That’s cute,” she continues.
“There’s people that have been doing this half the time that have twice as many [Grammys]. I won two Grammys the first year I started, but after that, [the Grammys] are like, ‘We don’t go with the people that are selling a lot of records and are popular; we’re going the opposite way.'”
“So I got screwed out of certain years,” she continues.
“I wasn’t bitter about it. I was just like, okay, well. I guess I’m not standing here barefoot onstage singing and trying to go a certain way. I’m just me.”
The iconic superstar, who says she’s “kind of restarting” with “a new album of regular music” she’s working on now, says she’s taking a “different approach” to her creative process.
“I think it’s like a fresh start,” she explains.
“A lot of people see that whole other image. They see this diva; they see hair, makeup, bod, clothes, whatever it is — and they’re like, oh. They don’t think songwriter,” Mariah notes.
“But I look at myself as a songwriter first, and then a singer. That’s what I love to do the most.”
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