Earlier this year Mariah Carey was legally denied the right to be the Queen of Christmas, and in an interview with Hot Takes and Deep Dives, ‘All I Want For Christmas’ co-writer Walter Afanasieff claims that over the years the superstar singer changed the origins of her Christmas standard to exclude his help.
According to the legendary, Grammy Award-winning writer/producer for the likes of BoyzIIMen, Celine Dion, Michael Bolton, Afanasieff said “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? So it just sort of developed in her mind.” “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 or anything like that.”
Carey, on the other hand, has several variations of how she came up with her most recognizable song, In 2017 she told Billboard that she wrote the song “basically as a kid on [her] little Casio keyboard.” In another interview with Cosmopolitan and Amazon Music, Mariah claimed she turned on It’s A Wonderful Life to get into the Christmas spirit before heading to her keyboard to write the song. Though she briefly mentioned Afanasieff in an Amazon Music interview, she discusses him as someone she got into the studio with to form her track fully but not as someone who was the song’s equal collaborator from the beginning. Most recently, in her memoir, she said the song came from her “little girl’s spirit and those early fantasies of family, and friendship.”
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Author: Al Denté
Photo: Filipe Vicente