An ultra-rare Mariah Carey demo tape from the 1980s has been discovered and is headed to auction next month, according to Rolling Stone. The tape is credited with helping the legend land her first record deal. In her memoir “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” the singer recalls scraping together money and bartering studio time to get her songs down on tape. 

The seven-track cassette, taken from famed producer DJ Arthur Baker’s personal archive, will be sold by the NYC magazine Wax Poetics. The demo contains early, unreleased recordings Carey made with songwriter Brenda K. Starr.These songs reportedly later formed the nucleus of her 1990 self-titled debut, including lead single “Vision of Love,” the No. 1 hit “Someday,” and the ballad “Alone in Love,” one of the first songs she ever wrote. 

Baker told Rolling Stone that from the start, “her voice still stands out, and the songs still stand out. Some songs have aged incredibly well. It still sounds incredibly fresh. She was a star even back then, and she’ll always continue to be a star.”

Baker, who said he first heard the tape after meeting 19-year-old Carey at a late-’80s industry Christmas party (how fitting!), also said he was stunned by what he found. “I stick the cassette in and the first three songs are all hits and I’m thinking holy shit it’s Madonna meets Whitney. She writes like Madonna sounds like Whitney. This is it, I’ve discovered gold,” he said in a press statement included with the lot.

Legend has it, Carey also gave that same tape to then-head of Columbia Records Tommy Mottola at that same Christmas party and he listened in his car. He then rushed back to the party to find her, but she’d already gone. He searched for Carey for two weeks while other record labels tried to outbid him. Mottola eventually signed Carey to Columbia Records in 1988.

The auction will not only have the rare demo, but it will also include a verified certificate of authenticity, archival notes, and "historical context from Baker’s collection and the Wax Poetics archive team." Wax Poetics CEO Alex Bruh said Carey’s demo tape is “one of the most sought after items we have come across,” and the site expects the tape to earn as much as $20,000 at auction. “It captures the exact moment an era-defining artist was emerging, before the world knew her name,” Bruh said.

The bidding opens Dec. 2 at 3 p.m. ET and runs through Dec. 11.