You’ve heard it countless times already this December. Over the past decade, Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You has muscled its way to become the most popular festive song of our time.
It’s already Billboard Number One – the same position as every year since 2019 and it’s Number Four in the UK. There’s no reason to believe it can’t climb once more to Number One by December 25, a position it reached in 2020 and 2022.
Its huge success is surely an immense source of pride for its writers: Carey and Walter Afanasieff. But unfortunately, it’s also become something of a bone of contention between them about how much each contributed.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the song is that it exists at all. Back in 1994, Carey was coming off the back of the success of her Music Box album. A Christmas album as a follow-up was an odd move. Back then, such things were seen as slightly naff relics from the 60s and 70s, not the sort of thing an artist seeking to manoeuvre herself into a credible niche in mainstream pop would do.
But according to an interview Afanasieff did with Business Insider in 2013, Tommy Mottola, Carey’s husband and CEO of Columbia, was keen, as was Carey herself. It had already been decided that one of three original songs on the album (with the somewhat dull title, Merry Christmas) would be a Wall of Sound pastiche, in the same retro vein of Phil Spector’s classic 1963 album, A Christmas Gift To You.
Afanasieff had been working with Carey since her 1990 debut. Together, the pair had written many of the singer’s biggest hits up to that point – Can’t Let Go, Hero and Anytime You Need A Friend.
And so in June 1994, the pair sat down at a house that Carey and Mottola had rented in the Hamptons to work on those three songs. Carey even hung some Christmas lights and decorations to get them in the mood.
According to Afanasieff, he already had the chord structure in place, but when Carey sang, she took the vocal melody of All I Want off to another place entirely. “My first reaction was, ‘That sounds like someone doing voice scales… Are you sure that’s what you want?’ he told Business Insider. “She would sing a melody, and I would do a chord change… it was almost like a game of ping-pong, back and forth, until we had it.”
However, a few years later Carey’s story of how the song came about seemed to contradict this. In a 2017 interview with Billboard, she appeared to be taking sole credit for the song, saying: “I am proud of this song that I wrote basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard.”
Two years later, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2019, she expanded a little on her story: “I wrote the beginning and the middle on the keyboard in a little house in Upstate New York, in a room by myself. I just started thinking about all things Christmas and growing up as a kid that loves Christmas… I guess that was my thing. I wanted to put a love twist onto a Christmas song, two of my favourite things in the world.”
“So when I got with (Afanasieff)… I recently read something he spoke about in, I don't know 2014 or something, where he said when I brought the song to him, he didn't like the melody and it was very simplistic.
"And you know what? That is true, because I don't usually start writing songs on the piano. I'm a terrible piano player, but sometimes the biggest songs come (from) just sitting down at the piano and messing around. So I brought it to Walter. I had already written most of the song, and we worked on the bridge and produced it together.”
In 2022, Afanasieff attempted to put the record straight. Speaking on the Hot Takes & Deep Dives podcast with Jess Rothschild, he rebutted her claims of sole authorship: “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… 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.”
“Mariah, the main writing that she did was the melody. I would do all of the music and the chords and she would do all of the lyrics. So after having written these three beautiful original song ideas, we had enough music to take it to my home studio in California. She started to finish the lyrics. I remember she would call me all hours of the night. She would throw ideas and get my opinions to help finalise it. I felt at the time that it was a very collaborative, very partnered (thing).”
The idea that the song was Carey’s alone clearly rankles him. Speaking to Variety in 2019, Afanasieff said: “She’s the one who made the song a hit and she’s awesome. But she definitely does not share credit where credit is due. As a result, it has really hurt my reputation, and as a result, has left me with a bittersweet taste in my mouth.”
“Mariah Carey and I have written a hundred songs together. So to deny my songwriting partnership with her on this one song doesn’t really make sense. All the songs we write are 50/50, partnership songs.
"In fact, if you ask Mariah Carey, ‘Who did you write Hero with’ or ‘Who did you write One Sweet Day with, she’ll go, ‘Oh, well, I wrote that with Walter Afanasieff.’ On this one particular song, for some reason, she’s decided to wrap her arms around this in such a way: like she almost does not want to admit (a co-writer).”
Afanasieff’s role in the song was much more than just co-writer. Having got the basic structure down, he returned to his studio and worked up a demo, playing drums, adding bass, computerised piano, sax samples, strings and timpani. The idea then was for it to be recorded in a studio with live musicians.
Talking to the Go with Elmo Lovano podcast in 2023, the songwriter recalled that session. “So we got to the Hit Factory (in New York) with all these incredible players – Omar Hakim on drums, Dann Huff on guitar, some incredible like-Weather Report bass player, Greg Phillinganes on keyboards – really really great musicians. So we all there and we started to learn the song and get into the vibe. I’ll never forget Tommy Mottola walked in and he’s listening to us and he’s like going ‘it sounds… country. It’s not as good as that demo of yours.’”
Despite all the talent in the room that day, Mottola was right. The upshot of it was that Afanasieff’s demo is what you hear on the finished track. “It’s just two people on the song, and Melanie Daniels, the singer who handled the lower backing vocals.”
For all that, there was no guarantee that the track would be a hit. Carey herself was hesitant, saying on CNBC in 2019: “I didn't feel, from a strategic point of view, that it was time to do something like that (make a Christmas album). As much as I love Christmas, I thought that the record company was off. Obviously, I couldn't have been more wrong.”
It’s hard to remember now, but on first release All I Want For Christmas performed modestly on the Billboard charts. It reached Number 12 in December 1994, whilst in the UK it had to settle for Number Two, stuck behind East 17’s Stay Another Day. It’s only since the advent of streaming that it’s become a commercial juggernaut. Its only competition now in terms of popularity is Wham!’s Last Christmas, which similarly had to wait decades before it finally topped the UK charts.
It’s also the most recent, and perhaps, final, addition to the Christmas canon. Whilst there’s been no shortage of artists putting out Christmas-related material in the 21st Century, few have gained any sort of traction, or even remotely looked like becoming a standard like All I Want For Christmas has become.
For Afanasieff, that’s a disappointment. “I remember being in the studio one time with (Canadian producer and composer) David Foster when he was producing Michael Buble’s Christmas album,” he said in 2022. “And I said ‘Hey man how about writing a song for Michael?’ And David (Foster) said ‘Oh no man, there’s no more original Christmas songs allowed. That door shut with your song, dude! All I Want For Christmas is the last song ever to enter the Christmas canon. That vault is sealed.’”
“And I remember I felt really bad about that. I don’t believe that, I really don’t. So I urge songwriters every single year – try to write the next All I Want For Christmas Is You.”
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