Songfacts®:

• In this new jack swing/R&B tune, Mariah Carey is anticipating the moment she can reject the man who left her when he finally realizes she's "the one." It's the third consecutive #1 single from her self-titled debut album behind "Vision Of Love" and "Love Takes Time."
• Mariah was a teenager when she wrote this with her songwriting partner Ben Margulies. It was included on the demo that scored her a record deal with Columbia. When Ric Wake, one of a handful of producers on the album, heard "Someday," it was instantly his favorite. He was thrilled when Mariah asked him to produce the track.
  
  Margulies liked the single because, he told Fred Bronson in The Billboard Book Of #1 Hits, "It came off really simple and clean, and the point came across. Nothing was covered up. The original arrangement and production were very simple and funky. It had a simplicity to it that kind of drew you into it. To take it and make it too much of a production would have ruined the vibe of the song."
  
  Mariah didn't agree. She thought it did sound over-produced and didn't agree with Wake's decision to replace the demo's horns with electric guitars.
• Margulies explained how the song came together. "That started out as a bass line, sort of a drum-machine, almost hip-hop type groove," he said. "Now people call it new jack swing, but that stuff was going on before all these terms came about. It evolved out of an improvisational track with some strong changes and a very strong harmonic structure. Mariah has an ability to improvise vocally and come up with great melody lines, great hooks. We generally work on a chorus first, but she would sing melody ideas through the verse and sections and it came about that way."
• Mariah developed the concept for the music video with director Larry Jordan. She explained in a 1991 interview: "Since the song is called 'Someday,' I would make it about me as a little girl liking some little boy and him ignoring me and me sort of saying to him 'someday, you're gonna be wishing for me,' you know, that was kind of like the concept."
  
  The clip was shot at a high school in Bayonne, New Jersey, and featured a group of child hip-hop dancers, along with drummer Larry Wright, who Mariah invited to the shoot after seeing him in a PBS documentary.
• Despite her positive comments about the music video at the time of its release, when Mariah revisited it in 2015 ahead of her greatest hits compilation #1 to Infinity, she said she hated the video because of the "tomfoolery" in the scenes with the kids. She even left it out of her #1's video collection in favor of her 1992 rendition from her MTV Unplugged special.
• Aside from topping the Hot 100, this hit #1 on the Dance Club Songs chart. It also peaked at #5 on the Adult Contemporary chart and #3 on the R&B chart.