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One doesn’t really imagine Mariah Carey losing her cool because of a crush. But, despite the mystique that she projects to the public, she’s a human being like anyone else—and that comes with sometimes becoming flustered by those that she fancies. A

nd, as she revealed on the Brown Bag Mornings radio show recently, there was one man who really gave her butterflies back in the 1990s. She just wishes she’d gotten the chance to date this person before it was too late.

Carey has been in promo mode for the last little while, preparing for the release of her 16th studio album Here for It All. That’s why she was on Brown Bag Mornings, but, despite the fact that she was trying to push her new material, there was time for some reflections on the past. And, at one stage, she remembered when she attended the American Music Awards in 1996. That was when she met Tupac.

The host of the show brought this up, trying to get Carey to talk about what it was like when he said hello to her. She duly obliged, recounting on air, “Well, he said it like ‘Hi, Mariah,’ and I was like ahhhhhh.” The encounter, she admitted, left her with “more than butterflies.” And when she was asked if he’d ever gotten the chance to go on a date with Tupac, Carey replied, “I wish.”

Carey had actually written about her encounter with Tupac in her memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey, which was published in 2020. This was how the host knew to prod Carey into talking about it. In the book, Carey wrote of her brief encounter with Tupac, explaining how, as she walked over to her trailer to prepare for a performance at the AMAs, she noticed a fancy car pulling up.

“As I stepped out in a complete rush to get back to the stage, I noticed a white Rolls-Royce quietly, slowly approaching,” she noted. “Just as my toes touched the asphalt, the gleaming elegant vehicle came to a gentle stop right in front of my door. It was as if time itself had slowed to a stop.”

Then she saw who was in it. “‘Hey, Mariah,’ he said softly, my name pouring out of his lips like smoke,” Carey wrote. “Then that spectacular smile burst through everything. In an instant, the window went back up, and Tupac rolled away.”

She was left flustered. “Had it not been for a production assistant or someone calling me back to the stage, back to earth, I may have stayed there stunned for hours,” she admitted. “My heart fluttered nervously… I’d just had Tupac Shakur’s eyez all on me.”

Nothing would ever happen between them, and, within a few years, Tupac would be dead. He and Carey never even got to work together as musicians, although Carey did interpolate Pac’s song ‘Me and My Girlfriend,’ which featured on The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, the first album to be released following his murder. Carey’s track, ‘How Much,’ featured on her seventh album Rainbow, and it hints at a collaboration that might have been, had things not played out as tragically as they ultimately did.