Can't Take That Away (Mariah's Theme)

Written in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre, Mariah Carey intended this inspirational ballad as a message of encouragement to kids struggling through adolescence. Carey suffered through her own troubles in school, where she was discriminated against for being biracial. During the making of Rainbow, she was also battling her record label for control of her career after her divorce from Sony Music president Tommy Mottola. "When I wrote this song, I had my days in junior high and high school in mind and also had my own struggle, where I am still going through right now," she explained in her 1999 Homecoming Special. "Okay, but if you have peace with in yourself, nobody can touch you, no matter what happens."

Carey wrote this with Diane Warren, the acclaimed songwriter behind big ballads like Celine Dion's "Because You Loved Me" and Aerosmith's " I Don't Want To Miss A Thing." Before Rainbow, Carey wrote all her ballads with her former songwriting partner Walter Afanasieff, but their relationship became a casualty of her divorce from Mottola due to Afanasieff's continued association with the music mogul. Carey reached out to new collaborators who were more in tune with her developing urban-influenced sound, such as R&B hitmakers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who produced this track. But she stuck with a pop master for her co-writer. Carey described her relationship with Warren in a Yahoo! Music interview: "We have our own different styles. Sometimes what she does is the opposite of what I do and I'll say, 'No, Diane, I hate that,' or 'No, Diane, we just said that word two lines ago. We can't say it again.' She gets really obsessive over stuff at times, but we get on with each other, so I can be very open with her like that. She very cool, funny, and unique."

Carey felt a strong connection to the song and was frustrated by Sony's weak efforts to promote the single. She took matters into her own hands by rallying her fans to call in requests for the song to radio stations and MTV's popular video countdown TRL. The strategy didn't get the single on the chart, but it did help the video debut at #5 on the show.