Shenseea opens up about meeting Mariah Carey for the first time and their new collaboration “Sugar Sweet,” which features Kehlani.
The Jamaican singer says this is perhaps her biggest collaboration to date in terms of the magnitude of the star that Mariah is. Shenseea went on Instagram Live this week, where she shared her experience working with the music icon. She told her fans that a collaboration with Mariah Carey seemed like an impossible dream at first, until it happened.
“Who would’ve thought that Mariah would be a fan of me?” she said. “Not me. First of all, Mariah I think would be on everybody’s list as an artist to be like that’s a dream collab. But nobody really puts her name down as a dream collab cuz she don’t really collaborate with people that’s the thing. So for me I did not even count Mariah in list of dream collabs because to me it just seems so impossible.”
The “Shenyeng Anthem” deejay also took a dig at her haters who had been criticizing her career moves over the past few years. “All of the hard work that I have been putting in over the past two three years are finally paying off,” she said. “Everybody who did a clown me and a say weh me a do and who say me flop. It’s finally coming to fruition.”
Shenseea says she won’t be releasing the video of herself meeting Mariah Carey for the first time because she was embarrassed. However, she calls the collaboration a win for dancehall and Caribbean culture.
“I don’t think I could release the video of me meeting her because I folded, I am embarrassed,” she admitted. “It is a big thing for the culture. Mariah Carey look pon we so we hot, we hot.”
“Sugar Sweet,” featuring Shenseea and Kehlani, is the second single off Mariah Carey’s sixteenth studio album, Here for It All, due September 26. The first single, “Type Dangerous,” was released on June 6.
Kehlani calls Mariah Carey one of her biggest inspirations in music and her “hero.”
“The earliest video of me singing and first song i ever learned was ‘Hero’ and everybody who knows me knows this is one of my heroes,” she wrote. “This woman is the definition of an icon. to have given us so much, for DECADES & never fail to impress us through all the twists and turns music makes.”