The cowriter and coproducer of one of many all-time nice Christmas songs – Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” — can solely go “ho, ho, ho” when he hears her inform the story of how the tune got here to be created.
Carey collaborator Walter Afanasieff, chatting with the Hot Takes & Deep Dives podcast, claims that Carey has invented an “alternate story” on the tune’s origin.
Afanasieff claims that Carey is saying she created the tune as a younger youngster, and it’s been bothering him.
“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 previous to that? So it simply type of developed in her thoughts,” Afanasieff mentioned. “She doesn’t play something. She doesn’t play keyboard or piano. She doesn’t perceive music, she doesn’t know chord modifications and music principle or something like that. She doesn’t know a diminished chord from a minor seventh chord to a serious seventh chord.
“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.”
The fact, Afanasieff mentioned, was that the 2 devised the tune whereas engaged on materials for her Christmas album. They had a protracted collaboration relationship, relationship again to her albums Emotions and Music Box.
“We were holed up in this beautiful home that they were renting, and it was the summertime and there was a piano,” he mentioned. “So the writing of “All I Want For Christmas” is, I began taking part in a boogie-woogie, form of a rock. Mariah chimed in and began singing “I don’t want a lot for Christmas.”
“So on and on, and it was like a game of ping-pong,” Afanasieff mentioned. “I’d hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me.”
The two are credited as the only writers and producers on the tune, with Afanasieff crediting Carey with the lyrics and music, whereas he takes credit score for the music and chords.
“I’ve studied music, I have degrees in music. I’m an accomplished orchestrator and arranger. I teach music. I’m not a schlump. I don’t play by ear,” he added.
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