Mariah Carey says she wrote the hit song as a child. Her credited co-writer says otherwise. Photo / Getty Images
Mariah Carey says she wrote the hit song as a child. Her credited co-writer says otherwise. Photo / Getty Images
Singing legend Mariah Carey has had enough of the ongoing accusations that her hit song All I Want for Christmas Is You was not created as she has said it was.
According to the Post, Carey’s former co-producer and co-writer Walter Afanasieff told the podcast Hot Takes & Deep Dives with Jess Rothschild recently that tales of Carey writing the popular Christmas track on her keyboard as a child were fabricated.
Now Carey, 52, has responded to Afanasieff’s accusations via her rep, who told the Post: “Mariah has never claimed to write All I Want for Christmas by herself or as a child. She has always credited Walter, as he is cited as a writer on the song, so that would be ridiculous.
“Not sure where that rumour came from, but Mariah is very respectful of writers and the craft, as she is a songwriter herself.”
But yesterday Carey threw fresh shade at her co-writer when she posted a video from a VH1 interview in 1994 where she details how she came up with the Christmas smash hit.
“I was up at the farm, upstate where we did the video, and it was night-time, and I was just walking around, and I got the idea for the song,” she says in the footage.
“I don’t know where it came from, sometimes things just come to me like that,” she continued. “That melody just came into my head, the verse melody. And then, I was walking around, and I just went in and I had a little keyboard set up there and I just kind of finished the lyrics and the melody just came pretty quickly.”
Mariah Carey tells VH1 how her hit Christmas song came to be. Photo / Instagram
Afanasieff, 64, says for years the pair were on the same page about how the song was created, but he says over time Carey began sharing a narrative that he did not believe to be true.
He said about a decade ago an “alternate story” started being spouted by Carey.
“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,” he said.
The Post notes that In 2017 Carey also told Billboard she came up with the song when she was a child: “I am proud of this song that I wrote basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard,” she said.
Afanasieff has gone on to slam Carey as an artist, deriding her musical ability.
“She doesn’t play anything,” he told the podcast. “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. She doesn’t know a diminished chord from a minor seventh chord to a major 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,” he said.
Instead, he attempted to set the record straight by explaining his version of how the song came to be.
He said the song was created by the two of them while they were working on three tracks for Carey’s Merry Christmas album.
Mariah Carey in her video for All I Want for Christmas Is You. Picture / YouTube
“We were holed up in this beautiful home that [Mariah was] renting, and it was the summertime and there was a piano. So the writing of All I Want for Christmas is, I started playing a boogie-woogie, kind of a rock,” he said while making the sound of the bassline.
He says at that point Carey chimed in with the now famous line, “I don’t want a lot for Christmas”.
“So on and on, and it was like a game of ping-pong. I’d hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me,” he said.
Afanasieff claims Carey was behind the melodies and lyrics but the music and chords were his work.
The pair are equally credited for the song, and no other writers or producers are noted.
Carey worked with Afanasieff on several of her studio albums, including Emotions and Music Box.
The producer’s claims are not the first time the chart-topping track has had its origins called into question.
According to the Post, a lawsuit was filed in June this year on behalf of the creators of the 1989 song, All I Want for Christmas Is You, recorded by Vince Vance & the Valiants.
