Foo Fighters paid tribute to Mariah Carey at an event in Los Angeles last night, playing songs from an alt-rock album the singer recorded in 1995.
Carey revealed in her 2020 memoir The Making of Mariah Carey that she secretly wrote and recorded a grunge-influenced album called Someone’s Ugly Daughter that was never released.
After her record label objected to the recording, Carey recruited her friend Clarissa Dane to sing on it instead and they released it under the name Chick.
The album was revisited by Foo Fighters at MusiCares 2026, an annual charity event which this year featured a range of artists performing Carey’s work at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
The Dave Grohl-led band were joined by singer Taylor Momsen for renditions of “Love Is a Scam” and “Demented”.
As Variety reports, cameras at the venue repeatedly cut to an “enthused” Carey as she sang along.
Other performers who sang Carey’s songs from throughout her career included Kesha, Jennifer Hudson, Laufey, Maggie Rogers, Charlie Puth and John Legend.
Around the time she disclosed her work on Someone’s Ugly Daughter in her memoir, Carey wrote on social media: “Fun fact: I did an alternative album while I was making Daydream. Just for laughs, but it got me through some dark days.”
In her book, Carey wrote about how she would “bring my little alt-rock song to the band and hum a silly guitar riff”, adding how the recorded music was “irreverent, raw, and urgent”.
She then described how she used the sessions to commit to a “character” similar to “the breezy-grunge, punk-light white female singers who were popular at the time”.
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“You know the ones who seemed to be so carefree with their feelings and their image,” she wrote. “They could be angry, angsty, and messy, with old shoes, wrinkled slips, and unruly eyebrows, while every move I made was so calculated and manicured.”
She continued: “I wanted to break free, let loose, and express my misery – but I also wanted to laugh. I totally looked forward to doing my alter-ego band sessions after Daydream each night.”
The revelation shocked fans at the time, many of whom joked that the R&B singer could also now claim the title of “queen of alternative music” and should release her original recordings.
“The Mariah Carey alternative album feels like The Missing Piece,” one social media user joked. “Like if I had this album in the 90s, by now I’d have serotonin, a house, the ability to not be so self-critical.”
