Strolling through the gates of Saint John’s University’s campus in Jamaica, Queens, Mariah the Scientist begins to point out personal landmarks. There’s Carey Hall, the dorm where she used to live. There’s the house across the lawn where the owners had huskies. There are the huskies on the porch. There’s the flat building where she took music classes. As she continues this blasé tour through her former life, it feels like she’s visiting a place she last saw decades ago. But she only dropped out of Saint John’s in 2018. If she hadn’t, she’d be another senior headed to the library.

Mariah says she doesn’t expect to run into anyone she knows, but a parade of people wave to her like the local celebrity she kind of is. You can glean bits of how she ended up in New York, after coming of age in her native Georgia, on her debut Master, a cinematic R&B EP about having your heart broken by a pompous goober. After high school, she followed a boy to Saint John’s, where she found herself on a pre-med path, studying science and earning her nickname. She intended to become an anaesthesiologist, a choice she made in part because it seemed like a gentle and undramatic sphere of medicine. As the relationship soured, she became more despondent and more stoned.

Eventually they broke up and she got into another difficult relationship. Hoping to communicate in a language the new boy, a musician himself, would understand, she turned some of her personal writing into a song. She recorded it in a studio nearby and delivered it, a sort-of ode for an audience of one. Things snowballed slowly from there, with her friends encouraging her, and her music made its way to SoundCloud and eventually to RCA Records. Those early tracks haven’t changed much since then, and the bones of Master, even with its slightly beefed-up production, are what she created in Queens.