Ready for a fresh start! Mariah Carey opened up about her disastrous New Year’s Eve performance in a new interview with Rolling Stone, published on Tuesday, February 21.
“I used to get upset by things,” the pop diva said. “This was out of my control, and had everything not been such a total chaotic mess, then I would have been able to make something happen. Even the dancers should have stopped dancing and helped me off the f–king stage. I’m sorry. It was a mess, and I blame everybody, and I blame myself for not leaving after rehearsal.”
Carey’s performance on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest was amiss from the start. As she kicked off her set with “Auld Lang Syne” and “Emotions,” viewers quickly noticed her vocal track didn’t match what she appeared to be singing. Carey told the audience she couldn’t hear the music due to a faulty earpiece. During her third song in the medley, “We Belong Together,” she appeared to give up, lowering her microphone as her vocal track continued playing. “It just don’t get any better,” she muttered.
The “Hero” singer and her team later claimed that Dick Clark Productions had sabotaged the performance for ratings, an allegation the production company slammed as “defamatory, outrageous and frankly absurd.”
“It’s just something where if I can’t explain it to the entire world, then they’re not going to understand it, because it’s not what they do,” Carey told Rolling Stone of her defective earpiece. “Just like I wouldn’t understand somebody who had a desk job and how to do that. I couldn’t. I literally am incapable of being in the real world and surviving.”
A little over a month after the fiasco, the five-time Grammy winner redeemed herself, delivering a stunning live rendition of her new single, “I Don’t,” on Jimmy Kimmel Live. The song and its accompanying music video, in which Carey sets fire to a wedding dress, were inspired by Carey’s high-profile split from fiancé James Packer last October.
Since then, Carey has found love again, this time with her backup dancer Bryan Tanaka. The couple’s blossoming romance was documented on her E! docuseries Mariah’s World, but she still wants to keep the relationship private.
“I don’t think we’re being public in a way that my relationships have been public before,” she told Rolling Stone. “I really don’t. To me, the best thing of this is to keep it a little more private. But I’m not going to not go places with him and enjoy our lives because everybody thinks, ‘Oh, it’s too soon!’ kind of thing. We all saw the freakin’ show. This is not a surprise.”
