LOVE TAKES TIME

"Love Takes Time" is a song
written by Mariah Carey and Ben Margulies, and produced by Walter
Afanasieff for Carey's debut album, Mariah Carey (1990). It was released as the album's
second single in the third quarter of 1990. It was the first of several adult contemporary-influenced Carey ballads to be released as a
single, and its protagonist laments the loss of a lover and confesses that
"love takes time" to heal and that her feelings for her ex-lover
remain. It became Carey's second number 1 single in the United States and
Canada.

Mariah Carey's debut album for the
label was completed and being mastered when she wrote the song with Ben Marguiles.
"It was sort of a gospelish thing I was improvising, then we began working
on it," Marguiles relates. "It was on a work tape that we had...and
we recorded a very quick demo. It was just a piano vocal demo - I played live
piano, and she sang it."

Carey was on
a mini-tour of ten states, playing acoustically with a piano player and three
back-up singers. While on a company plane, she played the demo of "Love
Takes Time" for Columbia
Records president Don Ienner.
"All the important guys were on the plane," Marguiles recalls. "Tommy Mottola, Ienner, and Bobby Colomby." Carey was told
the song was a "career-maker," and that it had to go on the first
album. She protested - her album was already being mastered, and she intended
this ballad for her next release.

The demo was
sent to producer Walter Afanasieff. When Carey flew west to work
with Narada Michael Walden on some tracks
for her first album, Tommy Mottola and Don Ienner were impressed with
Afanasieff's work and gave him an executive staff producer job with the label.

"I guess
to see if he made the right choice, (Tommy) called me up one day,"
remembers Afanasieff. "He said, 'We've got this Mariah Carey album done,
but there's a song that she and Ben Marguiles wrote that is phenomenal, and I
want to try everything we can to put it on the album.' I said, 'What do you
want me to do?' and he said, 'You only have a couple of days, but are you ready
to cut it?' I couldn't believe the opportunity that it was. I'd never produced
anything by myself up until that time."

The demo was
very close to what Mottola wanted the finished product to be, according to
Afanasieff. "We cut the song and the music and the basics in about a day -
and the only reason is this deadline. It was do it or we were gonna miss out on
the whole thing. We got the tape and recorded everything and we got on the
plane and went to New York (and) did her vocals. She did all the backgrounds,
practically sang all night...We came back to the studio that afternoon, and we
had to fix one line very quickly, and then (engineer) Dana (Jon Chapelle) and I
got back on the plane with the tape, went back to the studio in Sausalito, and
mixed it. So it was a three-day process: a day and a half for music, kind of
like a day for vocals, and a day for mixing."

Afanasieff
heard from Columbia executives as soon as they received the mix. They wanted
Carey's vocal a little louder, so a remix was quickly completed. The producer
asked if the song would still make the debut album, and was told, "We're
going to do our best."

When the
album was released, "Love Takes Time" was not listed on the cassette
or compact disc. "(On) some of the original first copies of the record,
they didn't have time to print the name of the song," Marguiles laughs.
"And so the song's on there, but it doesn't say that it's on there. It was
a song that actually was strong enough to stop the pressing...I don't know if
they had to throw away a few hundred copies."[1]

For the
release to radio, a second mix was created that muffled Carey's whistle note in
the background of the song, during the song's bridge. This version of the song
appeared in all of the official single releases of "Love Takes Time"
in the US and abroad.

"Love Takes Time" was
another success like Carey's debut single "Vision of Love" in the United States: it reached number 1
in its ninth week on the Billboard Hot
100and spent three weeks at the top of the chart, from November 10
to November 24, 1990. It spent 17 weeks in the top 40 and the RIAA certified it
gold. It topped every otherBillboard chart for which it was
eligible (including the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks). Because
its success was divided over two calendar years it did not rank high on Billboard's
year-end charts, making 76 on the 1990 chart and 69 on the 1991 chart.

However,
"Love Takes Time" failed to emulate its U.S. success in any other
market except Canada, where it topped the Canadian Singles Chart for one week.
"Love Takes Time" reached the top ten in New Zealand. It did not make
much of an impact elsewhere, becoming a moderate top 20 hit in Australia, and
top 40 hit in the UK and the Netherlands, but failed to reach the top 40 in
Germany.

The song did
not receive as many awards as "Vision of Love", but it still managed
to win a BMI R&B Award for Song of the
Year and a Songwriter Award.