Carey debuted with an album of uplifting dance pop and R&B ballads, each song's composition co-credited to Carey and each providing an opportunity to unleash her wide vocal range. 

 Carey's follow-up to her top-selling debut finds the singer relaxing into her form, less self-conscious about her vocal tricks and hooked up with a sassier studio crowd, notably the postdisco super-producers David Cole and Robert Clivilles.  

 Carey softened her approach on Music Box, putting a damper on the just-for-fun disco of her previous records, and mainstreaming her lite soul into "uplifting" ballad territory. "Hero" soared on wings of Carey's golden tone to Number One. 

 On Daydream Carey edged toward the harder end of the musical spectrum in baby steps. She enlists Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of Tom Tom Club and the British producer Adrian Belew to rewrite Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" as her own. 

 Names like Puffy, Krayzie and Wish Bone, Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Q-Tip and David Morales show up in the liner notes of Mariah Carey's Butterfly, and more interestingly, the sounds that made those names recognizable are all over the record. 

 Rainbow is an uneasy exercise in hip-hop bombast, pumping up the jams to operatic lengths and complexity and declaring the singer's independence in a handful of braying ballads in which Mariah serenades "the light in me." 

 With the possible semi-exception of "Loverboy," there's nothing to recommend the infamous Glitter except its novelty status–it's the product of a dramatic public meltdown. Carey's career crashed and burned spectacularly. 

 Carey bounded back with a recording that isn't markedly unlike Glitter. But Charmbracelet did its job: reestablishing the perception that she had reclaimed her career and her sanity.  

 Then came the Emancipation of Mimi, which is exactly what it announces itself to be: the return of the inspired, confident Carey. The 2005 disc boasts one of the most magnificent ballads of her career, the soulful, yearning "We Belong Together,"  

 Though glorious high notes and sweeping shifts in register were the focus of her first nine studio albums, Carey indulges the prevailing pop trend of 2008 and squashes her melodies into a narrow vocal range on E=MC2. 

 Just one year separates E=MC2 from Memoirs of An Imperfect Angel, but in that time Carey married actor/TV host Nick Cannon and reignited an old feud with Eminem. 

 Perhaps no other contemporary diva is more closely associated with slow, emotional songs than Carey, and 2009's The Ballads collects key tracks from her tenure at Columbia Records, which ended in 1999.