NEWSMariah Carey's Cowriter Claims Singer 'Doesn't Understand Music' Well Enough To Have Written 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' By Herself
Walter Afanasieff is calling Mariah Carey out for allegedly attempting to take all of the credit for writing "All I Want For Christmas Is You."
Carey previously claimed in 2017 that she started writing the song as a child on a keyboard, however, Afanasieff, who co-wrote the holiday tune, revealed it would have been nearly impossible for the megastar to have written the classic by herself.
"She doesn’t understand music," he explained of the self-proclaimed Queen of Christmas on the Thursday, December 22, episode of the "Hot Takes & Deep Dives" podcast. "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."
The record producer added, "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."
"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," the 64-year-old continued.
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Afanasieff also noted that Carey did not play any instruments at the time the song was written and they had both been "on the same page" about who wrote the song "until probably 10 years ago."
In her 2019 documentary, Mariah Carey Is Christmas: The Story of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You, she elaborated on her recollection of the songwriting process.
"I was living in this house, upstate in New York. Actually, I put on It’s a Wonderful Life downstairs," she said in one of the scenes. "You could hear it throughout the house. And I went into this small room, and there was a little keyboard in there. And I started playing. And I’m a terrible piano player, right? Sometimes it’ll be like a happy accident. When I got into the studio with Walter A, we came up with a lot of different ideas to make it feel like a classic."
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"All I Want For Christmas Is You" was recorded for Carey's fourth studio album and released in 1994. It has since gone down in music history as one of the most memorable Christmas-themed pop songs of all time.
