MH: Plus working out is a good stress reliever.
MC: Yeah. For me stress manifests itself in my back. No interviewer has ever done this. [Placing my hand on her back] Feel that? It's full of knots. I used to think it was because I was sitting at a desk, and I was like, this is not for me, sitting at a desk. But that's just where I feel stress.
MH: Honestly, when I first heard the title of that album, The Emancipation of Mimi, I really wasn't sure what to think. Does it have any relation to the Mimi in La Bohème?
MC: That's actually pretty great, but I never thought of that. It's just my nickname. There was a time when a lot of people used that for me, and then it turned into just two or three people who are close to me. I felt it was appropriate because this album was like a new beginning for me. It was like losing the baggage.

MH: You needed your own valet for all that baggage.
MC: I've been through the ringer. On my own label. Emotionally, not physically - I haven't been around the block; I've protected myself from that. I don't want to say that I'm judging anybody. I'm just saying I know people who are 16 that have been around the block too many times and you see it in their eyes.
MH: It seems like those who are the types of people who would relate to your ballads.
MC: I have a song called "Petals" that's completely about me growing up and my family. And so many people relate to it. And it'll be people from other countries, like a girl from Germany who'll talk to me. Songs like that usually are not vocal performance moments. It's really weird to me because I feel like that's the expression of who I am, that's the true me. And people don't know me for that. They don't see that side, and I don't really care because the people that need to see it see it.

MH: You've got a song for pretty much every stage in the life cycle of a relationship. You didn't even date in high school. Where do you get your material?
MC: I did date in high school, but I didn't go all the way - that sounds so corny but whatever - because I knew I wasn't going to marry those people, and because I had such a fear of intimacy, which I still have, and a fear of being taken advantage of. I had experienced things and witnessed things as a kid that I didn't want to happen to me.
MH: Does your material come from that time, or is it recent relationships too?
MC: I think it's a combination. There's a certain time period in my life, my adolescence, that definitely influenced how I write. That's when I really started writing about my feelings when it had to do with relationships, even though they were not physical relationships, even if it was like a crush. And I think that that's the strongest thing.

MH: Unrequited love?
MC: Yeah. And people can relate to that. Even if they've had the relationship and been through it, which I also write about. It's like you've been through it, you've romanticized it, and then it didn't work. And that's a devastating thing to a lot of people. Especially if you're, like, Wait a minute, I thought I was giving my all - not to use one of my songs - to this moment, and how can this not work? Everything else in my life I sort of predicted, and here I am in this thing that's not working out.
MH: You once told Larry King, "I don't know that I've ever actually really been in love." Is it that longing for love that inspires you?
MC: I hate to go into this because I think people are friggin' sick of it and yet some people have no idea: I come from a biracial union. I grew up with my white mother, who is a wonderful person and a civil rights activist, but, still, she's an Irish-American woman who could never understand what it feels like to be black. Because my father was black, whether kids knew it or not, I still looked different to them. They would call me any number of racial slurs. By the time I came to the point where people would do it to my face, I was already little miss tough girl and they were scared of me and thought I would fight them and whatever.

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