Mariah Carey on the 25th Anniversary of ‘Butterfly,’ and Bonding With Meghan Markle and Prince

variety.com:

A.D. Amorosi One might think that on the 25th anniversary of her seminal 1997 album “Butterfly” and the release of her new butterfly-themed Chopard jewelry collab with Caroline Scheufele this week, Mariah Carey would be all about butterflies, the beauty of winged flight and transformational-metamorphosis metaphors.

Mariah Carey is not corny like that. “You know, I didn’t have a thing with butterflies when I was a kid,” she says during a phone interview. “I wasn’t one of those little girls who had a fascination with butterflies, even though I knew children who did.

It is just something that happened. When I made that album, I was leaving a point in my life that was extremely stifling and I had to go through an actual metamorphosis to become a grown woman who was strong enough to get out of that situation.

It was me breaking through, to become free enough to fly.” The “stifling” that Carey is referring to is her marriage to Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola, whom she married in 1993 (when she was 23 and he was 43) and divorced five years later.