Read Mariah Carey’s Delightfully Bonkers But Deadly Serious Songwriters Hall of Fame Acceptance Speech

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorGrammy Awards are one thing, but being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame is another matter — the inductees are decided by a relatively small group of songwriting and music-publishing peers and celebrated at an invite-only event, and it’s a tough crowd.It’s a sadly common assumption that female pop stars don’t write their own songs — even Taylor Swift, one of the greatest and most distinctive songwriters of the past 25 years, is often greeted with skepticism.

So for Mariah Carey — who was mocked in a widely shared meme when she made a statement beginning with the words “As a songwriter” — to be inducted is a big deal.

She was actually announced in 2020, but because of the pandemic, the ceremony was not held until Thursday night. At the ceremony, Carey was introduced at the stroke of midnight by Roots drummer and “Summer of Soul” director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson — an Oscar- and Grammy-winning trained musician and author who knows of what he speaks.

He began by jokingly recalling that when he first had the opportunity to meet her in the 1990s, he was “so intimidated by how she smelled — Smokey Pineapple or whatever she was wearing,” that he ducked out before meeting her.