The cowriter and coproducer on Mariah Carey’s much-loved Xmas track “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is refuting Carey’s declare that she wrote the track as a child. For context, Walter Afanasieff collaborated with Carey on her first six studio albums and has gained two Grammys: one in 1999 for Record Of The Year (for producing Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”), and in 2000 he gained Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical. Anyway, just lately Afanasieff went on the Hot Takes & Deep Dives With Jess Rothschild podcast, the place he claimed that Carey had invented an “alternate story” round how “All I Want For Christmas Is You” happened.
“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?,” Afanasieff stated. “So it simply kind of developed in her thoughts. She doesn’t play something. She doesn’t play keyboard or piano. She doesn’t perceive music, she doesn’t know chord adjustments and music principle or something like that. She doesn’t know a diminished chord from a minor seventh chord to a serious 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 went on to say how the 2 got here up with the track whereas engaged on music for her 1994 Christmas album. “We were holed up in this beautiful home that they were renting, and it was the summertime and there was a piano,” he stated. “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.’”
He added: “So on and on, and it was like a game of ping-pong. I’d hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me.”
In 2017, Carey advised Billboard that she got here up with the track when she was a child. “I am proud of this song that I wrote basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard,” she stated. Carey additionally advised a distinct model of occasions in her 2019 documentary Mariah Carey is Christmas: The Story of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You, where she implied that she’d began the track on her personal earlier than “getting in the studio” with Afanasieff.