Mariah Carey's “All I Want for Christmas Is You” co-writer has said her story about the song’s origins is “kind of a tall tale.”
Appearing on Hot Takes & Deep Dives with Jess Rothschild, Walter Afanasieff referred to Carey’s past claim that she came up with the festive tune on a Casio keyboard when she was a child.
“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.
What’s more, Afanasieff claimed, Carey doesn’t actually have any musical ability. “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. 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.”
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A rep for Carey issued a statement that said the singer “has never claimed to write ‘All I Want for Christmas’ by herself or as a child … not sure where that rumour came from.”
When “All I Want for Christmas Is You” made it into the Top 10 on the U.S. singles chart for the first time in 2017, Carey told Billboard: “It truly warms my heart, and I am proud of this song that I wrote basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard.”
Carey responded to Afanasieff’s claim by posting a throwback clip from VH-1 in which she is talking about how the song came to be.
“I was up at the farm, upstate where we did the video, and it was nighttime, and I was just walking around, and I got the idea for the song,” she recalled. “I don’t know where it came from, sometimes things just come to me like that. 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.”
In the podcast interview, Afanasieff said he and Carey crafted “All I Want for Christmas Is You” together while he was at a piano.
“I started playing a boogie-woogie, kind of a rock,” he recalled, as Carey started singing lyrics. “It was like a game of pingpong. I’d hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me.”