The co-writer and co-producer of one of the greatest Christmas songs of all time – Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” – can only say “ho, ho, ho” when he hears her tell the story of how the song came to be is to be created.
Carey employee Walter Afanasieff in conversation with the Hot takes & deep dives podcast, claims that Carey invented an “alternative story” about the song’s origin.
Afanasieff claims Carey said she created the song when she was a young child, and it bothered him.
“When she started pointing out, ‘Oh, I wrote that song when I was a little girl!’ But why didn’t you say that 12 or 13 or 15 years ago? So it just evolved in her head,” Afanasieff said. “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.”
The truth, Afanasieff said, is that the pair developed the song while working on material for their Christmas album. They had a long collaboration dating back to their albums emotions and Jukebox.
“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.”
“So on and so on, and it was like a ping pong game,” Afanasieff said. “I would hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me.”
The two are credited as the song’s sole writers and producers, with Afanasieff crediting Carey with the lyrics and music while acknowledging the music and chords.
“I studied music, I have degrees in music. I am an accomplished orchestrator and arranger. i teach music I’m not a smurf. I don’t play by ear,” he added.