Pop queen Mariah Carey set to play 3 shows in Honolulu

When Mariah Carey comes to Honolulu next week for three Thanksgiving weekend concerts, she will be armed with more No. 1 singles than she can likely fit into one show — 18 in all.

Though best known for soaring vocals and diva antics, other facets of Carey’s career have been overlooked, including her songwriting and her strides in pop-music innovation and empowerment of women in the industry.

Carey caught ears when she debuted in 1990 with the chart-topper “Vision of Love.” Her singing took Whitney Houston’s technical perfection and added dollops of soul … liberally.

Getting less notice was the songwriting on her eponymous debut album, which was astonishingly polished for a 20-year-old rookie. Carey co-wrote every song on that album and has had a hand in 17 of her 18 No. 1 singles. (The lone exception is her “MTV Unplugged” cover of the Jackson 5 chart-topper “I’ll Be There.”)

For skeptics who think she’s getting token credit, Carey is listed as sole composer on two of those No. 1s (“Hero” and “My All”). She explained her writing process to Complex, a music magazine, earlier this year. (Carey did not grant the Honolulu Star-Advertiser an interview.)

“We create the bed of music that I’m going to sing over,” she said, describing the collaborative process. “People don’t really get what that means unless you do it. They think, ‘OK, so she probably writes the lyrics.’ No, I write the lyrics, the melody, and the music with (producers). I’m not a piano player — I can play a little bit — but I really like to help mold whoever’s playing.”

Jussie Smollett, the “Empire” star who shared the screen with Carey last month when she did a guest spot on the hit Fox drama, and who will open for her on her tour’s Hawaii dates, and speaks glowingly of her accomplishments.

“Her songwriting catalog alone is one of the greatest catalogs of all time — one of the most successful catalogs of all time, but also one of the truly best-written catalogs of all time,” Smollett told the Star-Advertiser by phone from Los Angeles.

With soul-tinged pop hits flowing as freely as her curly locks, Carey dominated the charts through the early ’90s, adding seven more No. 1 hits, most of them ballads, but once in a while throwing in livelier fare such as “Someday” and “Emotions.” The latter saw her taking her reported five-octave range to new heights.

She probably could have built a nice career just playing it safe, battling Celine Dion and Houston for chart position, but what she did in 1995 was a game-changer, for both her career and the music industry.

Builton a sample from the Tom Tom Club classic “Genius of Love,” “Fantasy” was a sensation from the start and quickly became Carey’s biggest hit to that point. It was the second single in Billboard history to debut at No. 1 (after Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone”) and spent eight weeks there.

More important for Carey and the industry, the song was her first step away from safe pop music. In addition to the prominent use of a sample, uncommon for pop artists at the time, Carey brought in rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan to appear on the remix. Though feature spots from rappers dated back to at least 1989 — when Eric B & Rakim helped Jody Watley’s “Friends” reach the top 10 — Carey was the most “pop” artist to try it. The effect on the music industry is felt even now, when it seems like half the songs on pop radio are singer-rapper collaborations.

Carey’s follow-up would be the wildly successful Boyz II Men collaboration “One Sweet Day,” a ballad that spent a still-record 16 weeks at No. 1. That might have cloaked the significance of “Fantasy” at the time, but it was the pivot she needed, setting the stage for her to remain relevant into the 2000s, long after her closest contemporaries were done charting hits.

On future albums she would work with a variety of rappers, from Jay Z (on the chart-topping “Heartbreaker”) to Jadakiss and Styles P of the Lox (on the remix of the megahit “We Belong Together”).

Carey was still hitting No. 1 18 years after her debut, a reign that seems unlikely to have stretched on that long if it weren’t for that 1995 pivot.

“Fantasy” was important for Carey’s career for one other reason almost no one thought about at the time, or at least to a degree no one could have foreseen: It was her first try at directing a video.

“I’d done a lot of videos and wasn’t always a hundred percent thrilled,” she told Fred Bronson of Billboard. “For the most part I was never thrilled with the results, so I figured I would give it a shot.”

If you listen closely enough, you can hear Carey’s 1992 hit “Make It Happen” playing.

She proved competent as a director and last year stepped up from music videos to helming and co-starring in the movie “A Christmas Melody” for the Hallmark Channel. This year, she signed a three-picture deal to do more of the same for the network.

The acting part of that deal is nothing new to Carey, who has more than a dozen credits. She’s also expanding into other areas of entertainment, with a reality show — “Mariah’s World” — hitting the E! Network next month, documenting the international “Sweet Sweet Fantasy Tour” that wraps in Hawaii.

After her run at the Blaisdell, Carey heads to New York to begin rehearsals for her third annual string of Christmas shows at the Beacon Theatre.

But first come those shows in Hawaii, the only ones on the tour featuring Smollett. He wouldn’t give up how much he’ll be involved in Carey’s set, but spoke a bit about stepping on his biggest stage yet.

“It’s gonna be a good time,” Smollett said. “I’m there to show what I got and get people hyped. … Before Mariah whips up the main course and dessert, I’m the appetizer.”