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 track got here to be created.
Carey collaborator Walter Afanasieff, chatting with the Hot Takes & Deep Dives podcast, Afanasieff claims that Carey has invented an “alternate story” on the track’s origin.
Afanasieff claims that Carey is saying she created the track as a younger youngster, and it’s been bothering him.
“When she began to trace at the truth that, “Oh, I wrote that track after I was slightly lady!” However 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 stated. “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 say that she wrote a really difficult chord-structured track together with her finger on a Casio keyboard when she was slightly lady, it’s type of a tall story.”
The reality, Afanasieff stated, was that the 2 devised the track whereas engaged on materials for her Christmas album. They’d a protracted collaboration relationship, relationship again to her albums Feelings and Music Field.
“We had been holed up on this lovely house that they had been renting, and it was {the summertime} and there was a piano,” he stated. “So the writing of “All I Need For Christmas” is, I began taking part in a boogie-woogie, type of a rock. Mariah chimed in and began singing “I don’t need rather a lot for Christmas.”
“So on and on, and it was like a sport of ping-pong,” Afanasieff stated. “I’d hit the ball to her, she hits it again to me.”
The 2 are credited as the only real writers and producers on the track, with Afanasieff crediting Carey with the lyrics and music, whereas he takes credit score for the music and chords.
“I’ve studied music, I’ve levels in music. I’m an completed orchestrator and arranger. I educate music. I’m not a schlump. I don’t play by ear,” he added.
