Nearly six years on from the release of her fifteenth studio album Caution (2018), Mariah Carey has revisited the LP’s closing track “Portrait” in conjunction with her ‘Portrait of a Portrait’ edition of Audible’s Music + Words series. The re-release of the ballad includes the expansive 16-minute Hopeful Child Remix of the track, which reinforces the Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee’s proven penchant for thoughtfully reimagining her songs for dancefloor consumption.
“I don’t know another word other than ‘real’ for what ‘Portrait’ meant to me at that moment,” she explains upon revisiting the songwriting process during the episode. “I was completely isolated by myself and saying, let me get this off my chest and we’re going to end the album with this. It’s still kind of a deep song to listen to.”
“It’s really something that’s difficult to explain or understand for most people,” Carey reflects during a recent Variety interview. “But it’s just something that felt so strong to me the way I wrote it, because it was really about the strong feelings that I had and then when I went to write for “Portrait,” it was almost a completely different song when we went to speed it up and make it into a dance record. So to go from such a slow, kind of very sad song to this uptempo, upbeat—still sad, because of the lyrical content—but much less sad because we whooped it up. I don’t know, I really, really enjoyed the whole process of making “Portrait.”
During the same interview, Carey referenced her highly anticipated new album and the songs she has written for the project to date, stating, “I mean, same songs are there. I’ve written some new songs. You know, I’m excited about it. I have to figure out which songs I’m going to do and which songs I’m not going to do. But I think I’m very excited about it.”
Enjoy revisiting “Portrait’ and listening to the Hopeful Child Remix below.
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