“The initial trepidation I felt about singing it live for the first time in front of an audience was melting away as I thought about all the people who had lined the streets and packed the theater to see me that night,” she writes. “I did my best to reclaim it, but it was a gift no matter who it was for.”Ĭarey debuted “Hero” during her Thanksgiving special, Here Is Mariah Carey - one of the first times she had realized her level of fame. So Carey changed some of the lyrics: “I went to the well of my memories and dipped into that moment when Nana Reese had told me to hold on to my dreams,” she writes. Sony Music’s CEO and her then-husband, Tommy Mottola, however, insisted the song go on her album instead. “As Walter worked to find the basic chords, I began to sing, ‘and then a hero comes along.’” Carey first thought the song was “fairly generic” and calls the demo “a bit schmaltzy,” but she thought it worked for the movie. “As soon as I got back into the room, I sat right down at the piano and said to Walter, ‘This is how it goes.’ I hummed the tune and some of the lyrics,” she remembers. She came up with the chorus on her way back from the bathroom during a studio meeting.
I was in the studio, doing it.” The song, she adds, “remains one of my favorites.”Ĭarey originally intended this Music Box hit for Gloria Estefan, for the Dustin Hoffman–starring movie Heroes.
“I did dance tracks, straight down the line, all different sounds.
I experimented with the songs,” she writes. Carey started writing this Mariah Carey cut at the piano in her mother’s house, then recorded a demo of it at the studio of a producer for whom she sang backup.