Mariah Carey recently earned her first nomination to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her immense talent obviously has a lot to do with it. But she has also thrived because she stood firm to her beliefs about how her career should progress, even when it was in its earliest stages. With “I Don’t Wanna Cry,” an early No. 1 smash, she compromised a tad to work with Narada Michael Walden, one of the top songwriters-for-hire in the business.
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Although the song was a massive success, Carey wouldn’t repeat the formula for how it was made often in her career. Let’s take a look back at “I Don’t Wanna Cry,” including its creation and what it all meant.
Carey that Weight
Carey’s career blasted out of the gates in 1990 with a self-titled debut album that produced four straight chart-topping singles. Many listeners heard the incredible voice and might not have registered that Carey was also very much the architect of those smash singles, as she co-wrote every one of them.
Carey penned the first three of those No. 1s (“Vision of Love,” “Love Takes Time,” and “Someday”) with Ben Margulies, who worked with her before she had even signed with Columbia Records. Once that occurred, label head (and future Carey husband) Tommy Mottola wanted to bring in some big names, and Narada Michael Walden was high on that list.
Walden was as sure a shot as there was when it came to R&B hitmakers of the ’80s, most notably via his work with Whitney Houston. Perhaps it’s not surprising that of those four Carey No. 1s from the first album, “I Don’t Wanna Cry”—the one co-written with Walden—is the most formulaic.
That’s not to say it’s not an excellent song, impeccably written and sung to the absolute hilt by Carey. It’s just that it’s the one that you could hear a lot of other singers perhaps interpreting, whereas the others are very much Carey’s babies.
Carey wrote about the collaboration with Walden in the liner notes to a 2015 Greatest Hits package. “The label was very excited for me to work with him because of his collaborations with hugely successful vocalists,” she said. “We wrote ‘I Don’t Wanna Cry’ together and it was very important for me to keep my identity as a songwriter. I was very grateful to him for the work we did together.”
That quote doesn’t sound so much a ringing endorsement as an acknowledgement that Carey got through it just fine. But it’s worth noting that Carey wouldn’t often do much of the big name co-writer thing in the future, preferring instead to work with trusted collaborators while mostly writing all her own lyrics and shaping her sound.
What is the Meaning of “I Don’t Wanna Cry”?
Walden found inspiration for the song from a 1961 R&B track by Chuck Jackson entitled “I Don’t Want to Cry.” It helped give Carey and him a jumping-off point for their song. They settled on the story of a woman trying to convince her significant other that their relationship is spent, and that more tears aren’t going to solve any of their deep-seated problems.
We can make a million promises / But we still won’t change, Carey moans in the first verse. In the second verse, that theme of refusing to tend to the barn door with the horses already galloping through town continues: I know we swore it was forever / But it hurts too much to stay around. Just a shadow of a memory is all that remains, not nearly enough to forge a meaningful future.
In the refrains, Carey does her best to convince him, and maybe herself, of the finality of the situation: Nothing in the world / Could take us back / To where we used to be. By then, she’s in her upper register, and she transmits that devastating pain in every note. As big a hit as it was, Carey hasn’t made many songs like “I Don’t Wanna Cry.” Maybe she realized that formula will only get you so far, and that it takes a feel for what you want to say to your audience to give you the longevity of a Hall of Famer.
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Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Global Citizen
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