Oprah Winfrey Sits Down With Mariah Carey for Apple TV+ ‘Conversation’ Series 

Oprah Winfrey has interviewed Mariah Carey many times over the years and they’re set to deliver another installment this week, now for Apple TV+ courtesy of Winfrey’s new streamer series, The Oprah Conversation. 

Debuting Thursday, the episode finds the two sitting down — in a virtual format amid the COVID-19 pandemic — for a deep dive into Carey’s upcoming memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. In an exclusive clip obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Winfrey first tells Carey that she believes “the lambs,” aka Carey’s fan base, are going to love the book for how it unravels the origins to so many songs, “written out of pain and chaos.”

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She also notes that in all the years and all of the interviews she’s done with Carey, Winfrey had never heard her tell a story from her childhood about a young girl named Maureen who was among the first to recognize Carey’s vocal gifts. The anecdote is one that opens the book, on page six.

“We were walking down the street,” Carey details when prompted by Winfrey to tell the story in her own words. “I just started singing and she literally stopped and stared at me and said, ‘When you sing, it sounds like there’s music with you.’ It was a wonderful moment that I’ll never forget.”

Winfrey then continued the story by reading directly from the book: “She said it like a proclamation, almost like a prayer. They say God speaks through people and I’ll always be grateful for my little girlfriend speaking into my heart that day. She saw something special in me and gave it words and I believed her. I believe my voice was made of instruments, piano, strings, and flutes. I believed my voice could be music, all I needed was someone to see and hear me.”

After reading, Winfrey said she recognized the story as a “truly life-affirming moment,” and one that “speaks to me how other people can be your angels, and don’t even know it.”

The episode is the latest in Winfrey’s The Oprah Conversation, following earlier episodes with Emmanuel Acho, host of the provocative web series Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man in a two-part episode, Professor Ibram X. Kendi, bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative founder and bestselling author of the memoir that inspired the film Just Mercy.

The Winfrey interview is not the only business Carey has with Apple TV+. The superstar singer-songwriter is working on an upcoming Christmas special for the streamer.