Mariah Carey Previews ‘The Rarities’ LP With Song ‘Save the Day’

Mariah Carey has dropped new song “Save the Day.” It appears on her upcoming The Rarities album, which collects the singer’s favorite songs from her vault spanning her 30-year career. The album arrives on October 2nd.

The pop star began working on “Save the Day” with early collaborator Jermaine Dupri years ago, she told Good Morning America. While the song’s genesis began years ago, its sentiment is fitting for the current climate. The track, which samples Lauryn Hill’s vocals from the Fugees’ version of “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” opens with strings as Carey’s lyrics center on uniting to make a better world. “We’re all in this together,” Carey sings. On the chorus, she implores, “If he won’t and she won’t/And they won’t, then we won’t/We won’t ever learn to save the day.”

“Basically, I found stuff in my vault, that I either started to work on a long time ago and never released, or, you know, that I kind of wanted to finish mixing or do whatever,” she explained to GMA of her upcoming The Rarities. “But they’re songs that have previously not been released.”

The Rarities project dovetails with her upcoming memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, which will be released on September 29th via Andy Cohen Books.

“It’s been a labor of love but there are a lot of very personal stories about my childhood that I think, you know, those were difficult but they’re very cathartic as well,” she said to GMA. “And the cool thing about this project is that there are songs that I talk about writing or recording even as a little kid until now that I found in the vault, and so we’re kind of putting this out at the same time.”

The Rarities will also house a second disc of never-before-released full-length audio from Live at the Tokyo Dome, Carey’s first live performance in Japan during her 1996 Daydream World Tour.