READING

Mariah Carey wrote ‘All I Want for Christmas

Is You’ in an hour and calls it her ‘greatest
success
It’s been 25 years since Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” debuted, but the iconic
Christmas song finally reached the No. 1 spot in the Billboard Hot 100 chart on Dec. 16.
It’s also made Carey a lot of money since it was released on her 1994 album, “Merry Christmas” — the
song has earned over $60 million in royalties since it was released, according to a 2017 report in the
Economist.
Not bad for a song whose famous melody was a “happy accident,” said Carey in Amazon Music’s recent
documentary, “Mariah Carey is Christmas: The Story of ‘All I Want for Christmas is You.’” Carey says she
started writing the song while living in upstate New York.
“Actually, I put on [the movie] ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ downstairs. You could hear it throughout the
house,” Carey said in the documentary. A self-described “terrible piano player,” she started plunking around
on an old Casio keyboard.
Carey has said she stumbled upon the melody and chord progression and recorded it on a mini tape
recorder.
“It was done very quickly and kind of came out organically, which the best songs do,” Carey said in the
documentary.
The final song was created by Carey and Walter Afanasieff, a co-writer and producer on the track.
It’s true the basic song only took an hour to write, then a week of two of finessing the lyrics, Afanasieff told
Billboard.
However, according to Afanasieff,
he played the piano as they wrote the
original melody together. (A
representative for Carey could not be
reached for comment.)
Whichever version is true, Carey
wasn’t originally sold on releasing
“All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
She wasn’t sure an original Christmas
song from a new artist would resonate
with audiences. “I didn’t feel, from a
strategic point of view, that it was time
to do something like that,” Carey told
EW in a recent interview. “As much as
I love Christmas, I thought that the
record company was off. Obviously, I
couldn’t have been more wrong.”
Today, Carey says the song is “one of my greatest achievements,” she told Variety in October.
“All I Want for Christmas Is You” is now the highest selling holiday digital song of all time in the United
States, with 3.6 million downloads purchased, according to Billboard. On Christmas Eve of 2018 alone, 10.8
million people streamed the track on Spotify.
Its recent place at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 is the first time a Christmas song has been No. 1 since
“The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” was released in 1958.
As for Cary and Afansieff, though they worked together on several albums, they had a falling out and
haven’t spoken in 20 years, according to the New York Times.
And while he hasn’t made as much money as Carey from “All I Want for Christmas,” he told the Times,
“I can say that my ex-wives, my children and my grandchildren are enjoying a lot of nice things because of
that song.”