Eighteen of the greatest songs of the best-selling female artist of all time on one album. What can I say, but Mariah Carey’s Mariah: The Ballads is a testament to her nearly 20-year career – a career she built on singing love songs.

Carey is the first recording artist to have her first five singles top the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and was named the best selling female artist of the millennium by the 2000 World Music Awards, after selling 200 million albums.

She also has the most No. 1 singles for a solo artist in the United States, so any album featuring Carey’s best love songs can’t be a bad album. It’s impossible – unless Carey’s high octave, window shattering voice and huge choruses aren’t your thing.

Although Carey has already produced two greatest hits albums, including # 1s and Greatest Hits, Mariah: The Ballads is simply a collection of Carey’s most popular love songs, the ballads. The album features songs Carey sang early in her career from her time at Columbia Records, while excluding her more recent music with her current label, Island Records.

While her current music is mostly R&B, The Ballads features Carey’s early days in pop, showing off her softer side and focusing on her vocals.

Including some of what are considered to be the best ballads of all time, Mariah: The Ballads is an album any one can enjoy – not only the Carey aficionados. Carey’s best are all there from “Without You” to “My All” to “Always Be My Baby.”

The album also has Carey’s famous duets that diversify the album, including “One Sweet Day” with Boyz II Men, “I’ll Be There” with Trey Lorenz, “Endless Love” with Luther Vandross, “When You Believe” with Whitney Houston and “How Much” with Usher.

The first single on the album is, of course, “Hero,” one of Carey’s signature songs from her fourth album, The Music Box.

Starting the greatest hits album – after Mariah’s nearly 20 years in music with the ups and downs of her career and the public displays of her worst breakups – “Hero” can be taken as a symbol of Carey’s own inner strength, her ability to rise beyond discouragements, and still produce good music.

source: The Good 5 Cent Cigar

Popularity: 63% [?]

Opening the fall album-release season with discs by 50 Cent and Kanye West is kind of like kicking off your show with the encore. You could stick around for the rest of the gig, but what’s the point? Luckily, after the dust clears from the September 11 showdown between the rap heavyweights, the next few months will bring plenty more fresh tunes worth checking out from fellow rappers (Eve, Chamillionaire, Ja Rule, Rick Ross, Nelly and Lupe Fiasco); R&B divas (Mariah Carey, Nicole Scherzinger, Mya and Jennifer Hudson); rock bands (Foo Fighters, Coheed and Cambria, Hot Hot Heat and Avenged Sevenfold); and smooth singers (Chris Brown, Mario, KT Tunstall and James Blunt).

Who will raise their “Umbrella” this fall and have the back-to-school jam that rivals Rihanna’s unstoppable summer hit? We’re not sure (though we suspect we know what Kanye’s answer would be), so we’ve laid out the contenders for you. (These release dates and album details are based on MTV News reporting – information supplied by labels is subject to change, of course.)

November 20 – Heavyweights: They don’t get any bigger than Mariah Carey, and while details on her yet-untitled follow-up to the career-reviving The Emancipation of Mimi album are scarce, she recently told fans via a voicemail on her Web site that she’s got 10 songs in the bag and is planning to work with old pal Jermaine Dupri.

November to-be-announced: Yet-untitled albums by Jennifer Hudson, Spice Girls (greatest hits), Daft Punk (live), Mary J. Blige, Slim Thug, Gnarls Barkley and Sean Paul.

Source: MC Archives, MTV News

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Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, old rivals in the pop music world, are racing to finish albums and release them this year. Carey looks like she’ll be the winner. According to my sources, she’s nearing the end of recording for a CD to follow up her mega-selling “Emancipation of Mimi“. Island/DefJam has set a November 20 release date.

Carey has been recording all over the world, including on her beloved Isle of Capri, where she was recently photographed cavorting on designer Roberto Cavalli’s yacht. In fact, she’s been working her ample posterior off, and has as many as eight finished tracks in the can, sources tell me. “She’s working with all different producers and writers,” a source said. “And she sounds great.”

Meanwhile, Houston is said to have two completed tracks finished and is getting ready for a third. Her album still has no name or release date, but all systems continue to be “go” according to insiders. The big news about Whitney is that she may be ready to quit living in Los Angeles, where she’s been for more than a year while kicking drugs and starting her life over.
The talk now is that this fall, Houston will resume living in Atlanta, the place where she had many painful experiences during her turbulent marriage to Bobby Brown.

Thanks to MC Archives for this update.

Popularity: 3% [?]