Mariah Carey – Open Arms

An American band took it to No.2 in America, and an American star turned it into a hit everywhere except the one country they shared.

Journey’s Open Arms stalled at No.2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1982, one place short of the top. Thirteen years later Mariah Carey recorded it for Daydream, and Columbia sent her version out as a single across Europe, Australia and Britain, but not in the United States. A song an American band had made into an American near-miss became, in Carey’s hands, a hit almost everywhere except the country both of them came from.

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The original had been an unlikely keeper. Steve Perry and Jonathan Cain wrote it for Journey’s 1981 album Escape, and Cain later said he had a bad cold the day he recorded the piano part and wanted to do it again. The take stayed. The song turned up on the soundtrack of the animated film Heavy Metal before Columbia issued it as a single in January 1982, and the Hot 100 took it to No.2.

Carey co-produced her version with Walter Afanasieff, the collaborator behind much of Daydream, cutting it at the Hit Factory in New York and at Afanasieff’s Wallyworld studio in San Rafael, California. She sang it at Madison Square Garden on October 10, 1995, in the concert Fox broadcast as a special that November. Larry Jordan, who directed that special, also directed the single’s live video, and Manny Benito adapted the lyric for a Spanish version, El Amor Que Soñé.

The single America didn’t get

At home, the release schedule was already full. One Sweet Day, Carey’s duet with Boyz II Men, went to No.1 on the Hot 100 in December 1995 and stayed there for sixteen weeks, and Always Be My Baby was lined up behind it as the next American single. Abroad, Open Arms became the third single from Daydream. Columbia issued it on CD in December 1995 and took it to British radio in early February 1996.

The TROS clip comes from the campaign that carried it there. Carey sang the song on the TROS TV Show, the Dutch broadcaster’s variety program recorded in Hilversum, which aired it on December 12, 1995. It was one stop on a winter of European television. German viewers saw her sing it on Wetten, dass..? in January 1996, and she sang it on Top of the Pops in London on February 15. A single built for markets outside America was sold the old way, one television studio at a time.

The campaign worked where it ran. The UK chart took Open Arms to No.4 in February 1996. New Zealand put it at No.8, Australia at No.27 and France at No.29. Rolling Stone dismissed the cover as ill-advised, and British record buyers disagreed. In Britain hers is arguably the better-known version of the song. In America it remains Journey’s, a 1982 power ballad, with Carey’s recording an album track that most American listeners met only on Daydream. The line between those two reputations runs exactly where Columbia did and didn’t release the single. In 1995 a hit existed where someone worked it, and that winter someone worked this one through Hilversum, Germany and London.