Lucy Liyou’s “We Belong Together” is a vivid and loving take on Mariah Carey’s classic

The FADER’s transgender charity covers compilation FADER & Friends Volume 1 is out now, available exclusively on Bandcamp until December 1, 2023. 100% of the proceeds go towards the Transgender Law Center, Mermaids, and Rainbow Railroad. Throughout the month of November, we’re speaking to the artists who contributed to the 44-song collection about the songs they covered.

Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" is one of the crown jewels in her catalog for its undeniable pop pleasures wrapped in a near-peerless vocal performance, full of complex emotional (and vocal!) highs and lows almost everyone would struggle to reach. Lucy Liyou, an experimental composer and ambient artist based in Los Angeles, cuts to the core of the original with her cover. It begins as a piano ballad, Liyou's voice crushed and smooth like fraying blue velvet. Around midway through Liyou brings in funereal synth pads and turns layers of her vocals into a ghostly choir. Throughout Liyou's version, the original's mammoth surges of catharsis are maintained but totally transformed into something new and essential.

Listen to the song below and buy the full album on Bandcamp. Scroll down to read Lucy Liyou on the original song and her cover.

What’s your first memory of this song?

I was in my cousin’s car and he turned on the R&B radio. It was one of my first times listening to music that wasn’t classical music or "Hotel California" by the Eagles. I remember struggling to appreciate what I was hearing, but then the final chorus kicked in and I spent years trying to figure out what the song was and who it was by.

Why did you decide to record it as your cover?

Mariah Carey is my favorite artist of all time. Her singing, writing, and vocal arrangements inspire the way I feel about my body—an acrobatic etude on the constant shifting, bending, stretching of self that I feel like is a part of my daily life. It was a no-brainer that I wanted to cover one of the first songs of hers that I had ever heard.

What does this song mean to you personally?

I think about the fact that she was in her mid-30s when she wrote “We Belong Together” and she still writes about longing in her 50s. It just reminds me that this wish for more, whatever “more” represents, is collective in experience regardless of age. It makes me frankly excited to know what “more” looks like in different periods of our lives.

What’s another song you’d love to cover and why?

Grouper is one of my heroes besides Mariah Carey and I’ve always been dying to cover her song “Water People.” I wouldn’t ever release it, but I think I would learn so much from trying to cover it in my vision while still attempting to capture the ineffable beauty and ghost of her music. I don’t think it would be very successful at all, but I enjoy viewing it as some kind of white whale (maybe when I’m older).