The co-writer and co-producer of Mariah Carey’s popular Christmas song ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ debunks Carey’s claim that she wrote the song as a child. For context, Walter Afanasieff worked with Carey on their first six studio albums and won two Grammys: one in 1999 for Record Of The Year (for producing Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”) and in 2000 he became Producer Of The Year, not classic. Anyway, recently, Afanasieff took to the Hot Takes & Deep Dives With Jess Rothschild podcast, where he claimed Carey made up an “alternative story” about how “All I Want For Christmas Is You” came about.
“When she started implying, ‘Oh, I wrote this song when I was a little girl!’ But why didn’t you say that 12 or 13 or 15 years ago?” Afanasieff said. “So it just developed in her head. She doesn’t play anything. She doesn’t play keyboards or piano. She doesn’t understand music, she doesn’t know chord changes and music theory or anything like that. It knows no diminished chord from a minor seventh chord to a major seventh chord.
“To say that as a little girl she wrote a very complicated song with a chord structure using her finger on a Casio keyboard is quite a lie.”
Earlier this month, Stereogum broke down the chord structure and compositional elements of the Christmas Standard (which has charted at #1 for the past four Decembers) in our In Theory column.
In the pocast, Afanasieff went on to share how he and Carey came up with the song while working on the music for their 1994 Christmas album. “We hid in this beautiful house they rented and it was summer and there was a piano,” he said. “So writing All I Want For Christmas is that I started playing boogie-woogie, which is a kind of rock. Mariah chimed in and started singing, ‘I don’t want much for Christmas.'”
He added: “So on and so on and it was like a game of ping pong. I would hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me.”
In 2017, Carey told Billboard that she invented the song when she was a kid. “I’m proud of this song, which I wrote on my little Casio keyboard as a kid,” she said. Carey also narrated a different version of events in her 2019 documentary, Mariah Carey is Christmas: The Story of All I Want for Christmas Is You, in which she implied that she started the song herself before she “went to the studio”. Afanasieff.