Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey: Singer/songwriter 22

UPDATED 07/18/1991 at 01:00 AM EDT • Originally published 07/18/1991 at 01:00 AM EDT

"I'm a definite night person," she says. "I hate getting up before 2 in the afternoon." Carey's phenomenal rookie recording—multi-platinum, four No. 1 singles, two Grammys—sure makes a ease for staying up late. "I just sit in bed and write," she relates. "There's something about the night. It inspires even when you don't want it to. Like, sometimes when I'm trying to sleep and these words come into my head, and I go, 'Oh, no.' I have to get up and write." She goes "Oh, no" in a different way when critics compare her with Whitney Houston ("I've written all my songs. Whitney is not a writer"). Worse was one critic noting that she "is being marketed as the white Whitney Houston." While Carey's mother is of Irish descent, her father has African-American and Venezuelan ancestry. Carey considers herself a "multicultural, interracial person who'll only make a point of it if I choose to, when people are misrepresenting or misinterpreting me."