Mariah the Scientist’s Real Love Life

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he drive past the gates of the Fayetteville, Georgia mansion that Mariah the Scientist and a bustling production crew have set up camp in sprawls across acres of lush, green grass. Just past the towering front door is a small gym outfitted with a compact, boxy, analog TV, a retro stationary bike, and a hefty silver boombox. Tucked away in a quaint upstairs bedroom, Mariah is having her curls tussled into an updo for a workout scene, where her graceful calisthenics become a fit of despair in the “Sacrifice” music video, a new single and first track on her fourth studio album, Hearts Sold Separately, out Aug. 22. Like her smash “Burning Blue,” which topped rhythmic radio this month, the song gives a sultry edge to 1980s synth-pop. She serendipitously made an album that marries the flair of the decade’s power ballads and stadium rock with the subtleties of modern hip-hop and R&B. Her parents were fans of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, but she gravitated to this corner of the era with producer Nineteen85 of beloved Canadian duo Dvsn. “Theirs was a more bold ‘80s sound,” she says of the aforementioned icons. “I feel like mine is more abstract.”

The whole mansion has been made to look like a relic of yesteryear, too. In the video, Mariah is something like an Army wife, awaiting the return of a soldier in peril. She tries to move through the mundane tasks of her day, but his absence haunts her. Mariah ideated the video herself, and her team brought in Cass Meyers to direct (Meyers made a cameo in SZA’s 2023 Rolling Stone cover story as her friend and photographer). “The concept is kind of like all things I was doing when I was alone in my relationship – working out, you know, homey stuff, but alone,” Mariah says.

She wrote “Sacrifice” one year into her boyfriend Young Thug’s incarceration as he awaited trial as an alleged gang leader responsible for murder. On Halloween of last year, he was finally released in a plea deal that all but banished him from their shared hometown of Atlanta and put him on probation for 15 years. When news of Thug’s freedom broke, Mariah was opening for Latto at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. “This has really been a long time coming and it has been really hard,” she told the crowd. “There was people who was telling me I would never see him again. There was people who was laughing at me and laughing at the situation, making fun of us…Let’s just make it to the end [of her set] so I can get on this jet!”

Since breaking through in 2019 with the fan-favorite “Beetlejuice,” Mariah the Scientist has built a loyal base, finding her frequently on the road and garnering hundreds of millions of streams on platforms like Spotify and YouTube. In many ways, she’s become a staple in today’s R&B scene. Yet there’s a particular fascination with her as the girlfriend of one of the country’s most popular and embattled rappers that can overshadow her substantial body of work. As a singer, she writes her own music and has sourced much of her own production, too, effectively working as a one-man band. Despite some public embarrassments – like the invasive leaking of Young Thug’s jail calls, revealing he had been talking to other women behind bars – Mariah plays both artist and partner with an earnestness that her manager and elder sister, Morgan Buckles, mitigates as a slight naivete.

“I am extremely transparent,” Mariah tells me before she shoots the gym scene, getting her hair done while Morgan sits on the bed behind her. “I’ve always been like that. I feel like as I’m getting older, the portion of me that felt like being so transparent will always get me the prize, I’m starting to feel differently about. Maybe I’m wrong for being so open. Maybe it’s wrong to be open because you just get stepped on so much like that.”

However, Hearts Sold Separately is Mariah living in her truth: it’s a concept album about her fierce willingness to love, even when she and women like her are treated like disposable, tiny toy soldiers instead of real forces that can change lives – and the world. It’s her best work yet, a tight, cohesive 10 tracks of literary, diaristic songwriting and expansive production. But on the promo circuit, her romance with Thug – indeed a major source of inspiration – can take up too much space. In the YouTube comments of a recent interview on a prominent platform, a fan wrote of the host, “She asked about Thug the whole time like we don’t care abt [sic] him.” 

Speaking generally, Mariah says, “I think that it’s crazy when I go to an interview and somebody is making it seem like they care about me and my success and they care about my music and they fuck with me as a person, and then all they want to talk about is my relationship. Or you notice that they know more about what they’ve seen about my relationship than actually being a listener of my music. What I don’t like is when interviews will be an hour long, two hours long sometimes, and the one headline they choose is ‘Mariah the Scientist is with Young Thug.’ It’s like we literally just sat here and talked about all this other shit, and this is what you chose to publicize about me?”

Spending the afternoon with Mariah, it’s evident that her love life exists beyond her partnership. She and her sister Morgan share a professional synergy, sibling silliness, and a deep bond that has powered them through a relentless schedule of touring, writing, recording, dreaming, and doing. She and Morgan speak fondly of their parents, her dad, a firm but loving former police officer, and her mom, who struggled to leave him before their divorce. On set, she’s warm and meticulous, but takes time to gush over her precious Tootie, the cat she’s essentially commandeered from Thug and takes everywhere.

“If you only knew how little of our time revolves around [Thug],” Morgan says before going full-blown big sister. “How much time we actually spend on fucking planes. We see the cat more than we probably see him. The shows are selling out. The songs are on the rise. The people are fucking with it. The art, it’s coming from her mind. Let’s talk about that. The reason you all don’t want to talk about that is because you can’t relate to that. You can relate to the heartbreak. You can’t relate to crafting something with your own hands and being awarded for it. You can’t relate to succeeding in something or even sacrificing certain things to get to where you need to go.” 

Softly, Mariah, the sensitive little sister, takes an optimistic approach. “But that’s what I would want to inspire people to do, [that] feels like the whole point of my career, the whole point of Mariah the Scientist. Mariah the Scientist was not a singer. Mariah the Scientist was a fucking scientist. A scientist who just decided one day randomly to use my free will to make music instead, and this is what it turned out to be. I feel like that is extremely monumental. Equally as monumental, I’m most definitely a lover and that is also something I would like to inspire people to do.” Here, Mariah (and Morgan) goes deep on making Hearts Sold Separately, her relationship with words, watching Atlanta evolve, and owning her accomplishments.

The album is so cohesive, thematically and sonically. How was working with Dvsn’s Nineteen85?
I think everybody should be a big Dvsn fan. I feel like they’re a really good tag team, for sure. Me and Nineteen85 are also a really good tag team. He definitely showed me the value in collaboration. Before I worked on this project, I was more the type to be like, “I don’t need no help. I’m just going to use this very basic YouTube beat that has no evolution at all.” I thought that was going to be enough. He helped me realize what it could be like to think outside of a box and explore more texture.

So this is your first time working with one executive producer from start to finish?
Yeah, for sure. I had never been to the studio with a producer and just sat there and worked on something. I used to get so much anxiety from it, so with him, it was definitely a slow start. I didn’t know what to say or what to tell him. I’m not super well-versed on musical terms. Obviously, as you grow in making music, you learn more about it, but at the time I couldn’t be like, “Oh, maybe if you cut the metronome on, then I can tell you that I wanted to be on the fourth beat instead of the third beat.” Working with other people who are not just musically inclined but knowledgeable on things like that, it made the process more technical.

As a music journalist, I don’t have a technical music background either, but I’ve found that people understand things like, “This song feels like when a princess runs down the stairs to her Prince Charming at the bottom of the castle,” too, maybe better. How did you talk about music when you didn’t have that technical language?
I had went to mix some of the music with someone named Jimmy Douglass. There’s a term I use a lot when I’m mixing a project: “I just want it to sound more fluffy, less sharp.” What I’m saying is that my voice is too clear. I feel like I can hear all the crevices of my voice and I’d rather it sound more like…Not an echo and it’s not necessarily super reverb-y, it’s like something else. I didn’t know if he knew what I was talking about. I remember saying to him, “I really don’t know the technical terms to describe it.” Jimmy Douglass is a very-established-for-years-and-years type of mixer, and he was like, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Back in the day, John Lennon told me, when we were mixing something he was doing, [that] he wanted it to sound like the Dalai Lama.” At that point, I felt like you can describe it in many ways as long as the other person is willing to have some trial and error until you get something that you’re satisfied with.

You’re also such a words person. Even the way you creatively speak and conceptualize things in interviews seems to translate to your lyrics. Where did that come from for you? Did you read a lot as a kid? Talk to adults a ton? I was an only child, so I was always chatting with grown-ups.
I feel like my sister – I only have one sister [motions to Morgan] – tells me that the way I piece words together [is] unconventional. I don’t know. I went to college, [but] I’m not blaming college. You know when you see a new word for the first time and you don’t know what it means? It’s almost like I don’t want to take the easy route and just define it. It’s like I’m trying to use the context clues to figure it out before I actually define it. Sometimes I’m wrong, but I think over time, the words that you didn’t know at all, I feel like they just stick out. I struggle with exactly what I’m trying to say, but there’s almost always a word that could describe it. Maybe you just don’t know the word yet. And I do feel like when I find new words, I like to try to incorporate them. I just try to use what I think I know.

Morgan, do you have a comment on this since you got brought up?
Morgan: I actually told her that sometimes when I’m listening to her interviews or watching her, she speaks as though English is not her first language. Not in a bad way, obviously you got to be incredibly intelligent to know multiple languages. But like somebody who is just learning these words. If you’re actually listening and you know what the words mean, it makes sense. But I see a lot of times online, people are like, “What is she talking about?”

Mariah: The other day, I did an interview and they asked, “Do I have any regrets in the music industry?” And I said, “Well, what I don’t regret is the fact that I haven’t made my career as political as it could be. I see that in order to go to the next level that awards you certain accolades or whatever, you have to move with certain diplomacy [she pronounces it unconventionally]. They’re like, “Why did she say diplomacy like that? And what is she talking about? Maybe she’s talking about selling her soul and joining the Illuminati.”

What are your favorite things that you’ve written for this album?
There’s a song called “Rainy Days.” I just like the word play. When I make a song and the words are basic, I don’t want to use the song anymore. I almost feel like with “Burning Blue,” the wording was basic. Not the first verse, but the hook though. I just feel like it was so simple. I just feel like that’s not really my style. I would like to elaborate more in the music. There’s another song [on the album] called “Eternal Flame,” and I like that one because I did a good job in describing this metaphorical place. I feel like people are going to wonder what that song is about.

What inspired Hearts Sold Separately?
The climate of the world made me want to make a whole project about love. I feel like nobody prioritizes love. Everybody looks at love like it’s a problem. I feel like back in the day, it wasn’t like that. Everybody wanted to have a family unit and be married. Now it’s like everybody is shying away from that a little bit. I just feel like there’s this long-standing war between men and women and I don’t know what that’s about. I wish it wasn’t like that, but it just is. And the more men and women I meet, I realize even though we are all human, there are huge fundamental differences that you don’t really acknowledge when you’re younger. I just feel like I’m Eve and I fucked around and bit the apple or something. Now I see everything totally different than what I thought it was. That was the catalyst of everything I wrote.

It also sounds like, in the song “United Nations,” you’re also expanding this idea of love as a potential solution for bigger social problems, not just romantic dynamics. It sounds like you’re also evoking your faith in that song, too.
Yes, for sure. Yeah, it was longer. I cut it a little bit short because I feel like when you talk about what you believe in, sometimes your listeners….I’m not trying to preach to them. I’m just expressing my own beliefs and hopefully that encourages other people. “United Nations” was one of the first songs I made that fell into the theme of what I was trying to get across.

With this album being so much about the sacrifices and the tension of being a lover today, what kind of conversations did you have with Young Thug about it? It also then seems like it’s revealing so much about your own relationship.
A lot of it comes from conversations you have in your own relationship. I feel like me and the person I’m in a relationship with, we grew up differently. We have different upbringings, we have different perspectives on the world.

What are those differences?
Maybe my initial views on marriage versus his. His parents were never married even though they had a longstanding relationship; my parents were married, but they wound up divorcing and they’re not really cool like that. It’s almost like you debunk each other’s theories, but you bump heads in doing that. 

What kinds of impactful feedback have your friends and family given you on the album?
They don’t always come to the studio, but once they do hear the music, everybody has their own favorites. You have to take everything everybody says with a grain of salt. There are so many songs Morgan doesn’t like. There’s at least two on this album that she didn’t like. I know that her favorite song is “Rainy Days.” I feel like I know her least favorite song. I ain’t going to say what it is because they going to get on her ass about it, because every-

Morgan: I don’t care. For clarification, there is one song I did say I did not like.

Mariah: Two songs. The song that she hated the most, that she didn’t want me to use on the project is “Is It a Crime.”

Morgan: Hold on, I never said…I don’t know what she’s talking about. 

Mariah:[Attempting to use Siri to make a phone call for reinforcements] I just have to prove this because she lying right now.

Wait, Mariah, what if Morgan says what she thinks she said, and then you get your proof?
Mariah: Okay.

Morgan: I never said I didn’t like “Is It a Crime.” What I said was, I felt like Mariah is such a talented writer. Like “Rainy Days,” the first couple of lines are, “I stare at an open sky and pray for rain/Hopeful like the flowers/Bet they feel the same way/Tell me love and hatred doesn’t coexist/Surely I’ll reply ‘That’s what resentment is.’” That’s deep. “Is It a Crime,” I felt like the hook wasn’t that complex. They basically just told me, “Don’t overthink.”

I get what you mean about how accessible the chorus of “Is It a Crime” is. But one of the things that is really interesting about “Is It a Crime” is that Mariah is able to boldly say, “Yeah, I like to be in love,” with also another artist who is also in a very public relationship [Kali Uchis, who shares a child with Don Toliver]. Is that how you felt about the song, Mariah?
Abso-freaking-lutely.

But I do hear where you’re coming from for sure, Morgan. 
Morgan: It was never a bad song. On the vinyl, she has two verses without Kali. I like the song.

So the second verse is more like “Rainy Days”?
Morgan: For sure. It was just the chorus. I do think that this album is a great representation of where Mariah came from, who she has grown into, and where she is going. To your point of how her friends and family listen to this album, I feel as her sister, as her manager, as somebody who was always into her music – I remember when Mariah was sending her first songs, I would literally write down the lyrics in my notes; I probably still got them. Just so I can sing them correctly. I just respect and appreciate how far she’s come. I lived this life with her. I’ve been the sister that she might’ve been talking to or complaining to, or crying to, or upset with, maybe at the same time and feeling like she couldn’t talk to me because she might’ve been mad at her boyfriend and mad at me. Knowing the totality of who she is and what she’s turned it into, I’m just very proud.

Mariah: That’s actually a very interesting perspective that I never considered. I always looked at it if I ever wrote a song about somebody, about how they felt. There’s so many people right now that think that my songs are about them. I remember this guy I talked to for two seconds in college; a year or two after I dropped out and signed a deal, he was writing me like, “If I knew that you felt like that, maybe we could have done things differently.” I’m thinking to myself, “You never inspired me enough to write a single lyric in life.” I think it’s interesting to hear somebody like my sister say she experienced the experiences with me. It is almost like they’re her songs, too.

I am really moved by the parts in “United Nations” that aren’t just about romantic love. Do you feel like your love for your sister is reflected on the album, too? Are there more platonic types of love that you feel like you’re exploring here?
We really have a weird relationship, not in a bad way. It’s just that we are different. I don’t know why I feel so strongly about people who are different from me. I have to get to the value and the balance. I don’t know why I’m doing that instead of just withdrawing or retreating.

But that sounds like how you’re thinking about men and women, right? It’s like there’s a difference there, but it’s worth understanding.
Yeah, for sure. I feel like I’m always chasing understanding, which is a problem. It really makes you not be able to rest. So I’ve been trying lately to practice my I-don’t-give-a-fuck vibe. But it is just not the way I am. I do feel like something like “United Nations,” saying “Forgive us for the fuss and fighting” is probably about me and my sister. I don’t have many songs that aren’t about a romantic relationship. It’s actually really rare that I can write something like that. So I do feel like I must have been writing about something that I felt really strongly about, and it’s not very many things that can get me worked up. My sister is one of them.

I live in Atlanta too, and Thug’s incarceration and trial was one of the first big political experiences I’ve had here. I’m wondering how living through that ordeal has made you think about the city that you’re from.
I love Atlanta. Truly, I’m just so strung out on Atlanta, it’s not even funny. I’ve tried to live in multiple other cities. There were just certain things with the trial that made me look at the judicial system differently. Our father was a police [officer] for 30 years, so we always looked at him like he was just a fair guy who just worked for the city and worked hard so that he could support his kids.

Morgan: He was a [Atlanta Police Department] homicide detective to be specific.

Mariah: I think that we didn’t have firsthand experience with the actual judicial system. I don’t feel like we ever experienced something like the trial with Jeff [Young Thug’s real name is Jeffery Williams]. I didn’t know him during the times of the things they were accusing him of, but you just wind up thinking about the person that you know, and the person that they’re trying to tell you they are, and it’s obvious contradictions. Some things are laughable, but it’s just crazy how they can create particular narratives. I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t around. I didn’t know him. He probably didn’t even know I existed in life. But I think that the worst part about all of it is that they banned him from Atlanta for years. I think that it’s crazy to tell somebody they can’t go home. I feel like we scrambled looking for somewhere to go. We had to rebuild something. I do feel like some justice was served; at the same time, it definitely made me look at the government differently. It’s really crazy, but I mean, hey, he’s out now. I appreciate that.

I think it’s interesting that there’s this resurgence now too of Atlanta culture in the mainstream with Metro Boomin’s A Futuristic Summa mixtape, with the girls like BunnaB, Bankroll Ni, YK, and Pluto. Are you following all of that?
It’s hard not to see it. When I was young, Skooly [of Atlanta rap group Rich Kidz], he was really popular. Travis Porter, I mean all of that was going on. We had a grand old time. I’m a little bit younger than them, but it was an interesting time. I think that the reason why it’s happening is because a lot of people from Atlanta feel like those people like Travis Porter and Skooly, they didn’t get their due. It was right when the internet was coming, and so I feel like some people figured out how to navigate it and some people just were still in the real world and Skooly and Travis Porter, these are people that really did this in the real world. I think it just was fire time. I like to see it.

Since Thug is on Metro’s tape, have you had conversations with them about this resurgence? Are you guys talking about it as people from here?
I think in their world it never died. 

It’s been the futuristic era forever?
For sure. These are innate personality traits and characteristics of them, so I think it’s just like maybe they think it’s just a cool time to just reintroduce it to people who weren’t around for that, like Gen Z and whatever comes after. Gen Z just barely caught it. I’m having a hard time realizing that people born in 2000 are 25 years old. I wonder what they think about it, considering they’re being introduced to it for the first time.

What were you doing in that era? How were you spending time? How were you dressing?
Man, I had a bang. I tried to bring the [ponytail] bump back a year ago. They joaned on me, but then I seen people doing it though. I feel like it was a very interesting time with the Hollister and the Aeropostale. I was probably in her closet [motioning to Morgan]. She probably was cockblocking the pieces.

Morgan, what are the hardest criticisms of Mariah to swallow? 
Morgan: I think being Mariah’s big sister, I just had to tell myself a long time ago that I can’t fight everybody on the internet. Mariah do all that talking and going back and forth to people in the comments. If y’all walked past me, I would really slap the shit out of y’all.

Mariah: I hate to say it, but that’s so true.

Morgan: I don’t know what it looks like on the internet, but I’m almost six feet tall. I will literally dog walk you and have no remorse about it after.

Mariah: I’m sorry to the listeners.

Morgan: Me and Mariah might fight all day long. We might can’t stand each other. We might’ve walked in here, not liking each other today, and if you had said something sideways out of your mouth, I would be mad at you. As far as what people say on the internet, I think a lot of it is always about her relationship, or them questioning her intelligence, and I just think they just don’t understand her. I don’t think her intention is negative. I think that’s the thing. People always take it for something that I don’t really think she means.

Mariah: I feel like people be acting like they care about you so bad after something bad happens to somebody. [If someone] felt so bad they committed suicide, now everybody’s like, “Oh my God, this is fucked up. I wish that she knew that we cared about her.” People be talking so much shit about me on the internet. I don’t feel like I wronged anybody. I feel like everybody’s mad at me for putting my best foot forward. You wind up doing interviews where you start asking yourself, do I even want to talk about my relationship anymore? My honest to God question to everybody is: if you feel like I was wronged in my relationship as an outsider looking in, why do you hate me for trying to work it out?

So the thing that’s coming to mind is the jail video leaks, do you feel like people hated on you for being his partner?
It’s like, “Oh my gosh, she’s so dumb. Why is she still with him?” Blah blah blah. It’s almost like they feel like I’m happy about it.

Morgan: I want [people] to be mindful that this is a real person.

Mariah: How would you feel? Obviously we’re not happy about that. Nobody. Me, nobody around me, probably even him. I don’t think anybody in this circumstance is happy about any of that, and I feel like people be talking all that shit. It’s like, “Oh, you still in a relationship? You still with him?” Do y’all really think I would still be in this relationship if it wasn’t something that I felt like was changing or was actively becoming different? Do everybody really believe in their heart of hearts I will be just fucking with a nigga who still ain’t shit right now? Maybe they just look at it like it’s entertainment.

Morgan: It’s like, if you are paying attention to this at all and really listen to this music at all, then you would know that people struggle. There are literally pieces of certain songs where she’s talking about potentially being suicidal and you sitting on the internet picking at somebody like that all day. I’ve most definitely been there, done that, and that that’s not something I would ever laugh at somebody about.

Mariah: It’s too many people to try to make a believer or try to make them see your point of view and I just be feeling so misunderstood. But hey, my shows sell out. They come to the show singing and crying and tell me that they understand, so I just feel like that’s all I can accept at this point. Maybe that’s the only consolation of this job. Plenty of people in the world don’t fuck with you, but there are a hell of a lot of people who do fuck with you and do understand you somehow. There’s another line [on “Rainy Days”] that says, “Still, I pray for love instead of common sense.” I just hope that this project doesn’t go overlooked because it really is a good project. It really is very telling. It’s a lot of depth.

I know you have to go shoot this video. So this is your most successful music on radio with “Burning Blue,” and now “Is It a Crime” climbing up the charts, how has reaching this new height in your career impacted what your vision is for yourself and for your future?
I feel like when I first started off, Speedy from Complex asked me something about doing certain numbers and I told him that I remember reading that to get [RIAA] Gold was 75,000,000 streams. At that point, I had never done any of that. I was like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t think I’ll be able to do this ever.” And now I have done it multiple times. And with the radio stuff and the Billboard Hot 100 and all that, it’s just like because I’ve never had it, I didn’t know how it works. It’s almost like imposter syndrome, and people are like, “Oh, you had a number one song on rhythmic and urban radio. How do you feel about it?” Hearing my song on radio is like so weird. I can’t believe that. Or if I’m in a store and they’re playing it and they don’t know that I’m there, it’s very interesting.

Say that my craft is football and I spend every single day on a football field, eventually I’m going to aspire to be in NFL because that is the highest caliber. Eventually, you wind up feeling like you are deserving of the highest caliber of something that you have put so much energy and effort into. I feel that way with my art. I feel like it is very taxing. At some point, you’ve exploited all of these parts of yourself and-

Morgan: What do you have to show?

Mariah: My sister’s a workaholic. She literally works me to the bone. So I feel like if I’m going to be working a project and I’m doing all of this stuff, then I hope that whatever the greatest caliber could be, I hope that somebody out there says I’m deserving of that. This might touch a few people the wrong way or tick some people off: I feel like if anybody deserves certain things as far as art is concerned, I’m most definitely one of them.