Mariah Carey’s Story About Writing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ Is Humbug, Collaborator Claims
The cowriter and coproducer of one of the all-time great Christmas songs – Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” — can only go “ho, ho, ho” when he hears her tell the tale of how the song came to be created.
Carey collaborator Walter AfanasieffThe spokesman for the Hot Takes & Deep Dives podcast, Afanasieff claims that Carey has invented an “alternate story” on the song’s origin.
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Afanasieff claims that Carey is saying she created the song as a young child, and it’s been bothering him.
“When she started to hint at the fact that, “Oh, I wrote that song when I was a little girl!” But why weren’t you saying that for 12 or 13 or 15 years prior to that? So it just sort of developed in her mind,” Afanasieff said. “She doesn’t play anything. She doesn’t play keyboard or piano. She doesn’t understand music, she doesn’t know chord changes and music theory or anything like that. She doesn’t know a diminished chord from a minor seventh chord to a major seventh chord.
‘So to claim that she wrote a very complicated chord-structured song with her finger on a Casio keyboard when she was a little girl, it’s kind of a tall tale.”
Afanasieff stated that the truth is that the song was written by the two of them while they were working on material to make her Christmas album. The two had a long and fruitful collaboration dating back to Afanasieff’s albums Emotions And Music Box
“We were holed up in this beautiful home that they were renting, and it was the summertime and there was a piano,” he said. “So the writing of “All I Want For Christmas” is, I started playing a boogie-woogie, kind of a rock. Mariah chimed in and started singing “I don’t want a lot for Christmas.”
“So on and on, and it was like a game of ping-pong,” Afanasieff said. “I’d hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me.”
They are the only writers and producers of the song. Carey is credited with the lyrics, and Afanasieff with the music.
“I’ve studied music, I have degrees in music. I’m an accomplished orchestrator and arranger. I also teach music. I’m not a schlump. I don’t play by ear,” he added.
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