If something about Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” annoys you, finest to keep away from buying malls now. Or the radio. Perhaps music altogether, for that matter.
Her 1994 carol dominates holiday music like nothing else.
The Christmas colossus has reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Sizzling 100 chart the previous 4 years in a row — measuring the preferred songs every week by airplay, gross sales and streaming, not simply the holiday-themed — and it’s cheap to imagine 2023 will likely be no completely different. One skilled predicts it’ll quickly exceed $100 million in earnings. Even its ringtone has bought thousands and thousands.
“That song is just embedded in history now,” says David Foster, the 16-time Grammy-winning composer and producer. “It’s embedded in Christmas. When you think of Christmas right now, you think of that song.”
Carey’s hit is so omnipresent that the Wall Road Journal wrote about retail workers pushed batty by what number of occasions it comes on of their shops, together with one who retreats to the stockroom each time he hears the distinctive opening bells.
But the story behind “All I Want for Christmas is You” is just not all holly and mistletoe.
The music’s co-authors, Carey and Walter Afanasieff, are in a mystifying feud. The authors of a special music with the identical title have sued in search of $20 million in damages. Whereas Carey calls herself the Queen of Christmas, her bid to trademark that title failed.
Carey’s sign ends annually’s hibernation
Yearly on Nov. 1, the music’s hibernation ends when Carey posts on social media that “it’s time” to play it once more. This 12 months’s message depicted her being free of a block of ice to make the declaration.
In each music and lyrics, the music was completely engineered for fulfillment, says Joe Bennett, musicologist and professor on the Berklee Faculty of Music.
On the time of its launch, most new vacation music got here from artists previous their peak and searching for a brand new market. In 1994, although, Carey was on the high of her sport.
“All I Want for Christmas is You” works as a love and vacation music. Carey units it up: She doesn’t care about all the vacation trappings, she has one factor — one particular person — on her thoughts. It’s saved imprecise whether or not it’s a lover or somebody she yearns for.
“It’s a wishing song and it works narratively,” Bennett says. “You can sing it to your beloved if you are together or not together.”
She sprinkles in particular vacation references: the Christmas tree, presents, Santa Claus, a stocking upon the hearth, reindeer, sleigh bells, kids singing and, after all, mistletoe.
The devices and brisk association recall Phil Spector’s 1965 album, “A Christmas Gift for You,” itself a vacation traditional. To high it off, a part of the melody slyly references “White Christmas,” Bennett says.
“That was my goal, to do something timeless that didn’t feel like the ’90s,” Carey defined in a current “Good Morning America” interview.
Billboard has produced lists of high seasonal hits since 2010, and “All I Want for Christmas is You” has been No. 1 for 57 of the 62 weeks it has run, mentioned Gary Belief, chart director. The Luminate knowledge firm mentioned the music peaked at 387 million streams in 2019, the twenty fifth anniversary of its launch.
Exact numbers are onerous to come back by, however Will Web page, Spotify’s former chief economist and creator of the ebook “Pivot,” estimates the music will exceed $100 million in earnings this vacation season.
“By most objective measures,” Bennett says, “it’s the most successful Christmas song of all time.”
Dispute between the writers
As Afanasieff has instructed it, a lot of the work on “All I Want for Christmas is You” was performed by him and Carey working in a rented home in the summertime of 1994. The group had a historical past, engaged on Carey’s albums “Emotions” and “Music Box.”
He began with a boogie-woogie piano, tossing out melodic concepts that Carey would reply to with lyrics.
“It was like a game of ping-pong,” he mentioned on last year’s podcast, “Hot Takes & Deep Dives with Jess Rothschild” (Afanasieff didn’t return messages from The Related Press). “I hit the ball to her, she’d hit it back to me.”
Later, working alone, Carey accomplished the lyrics and Afanasieff recorded all of the devices.
Then issues turned difficult. Carey was married on the time to Tommy Mottola, head of Sony Music. They broke up in 1997 and her relationship with Afanasieff, who saved working for Mottola, turned a casualty of that fractured marriage.
Afanasieff instructed Rothschild that he and Carey didn’t converse for about 20 years till she referred to as him across the time of the music’s twenty fifth anniversary, asking for the co-writer’s permission to make use of the “All I Want for Christmas is You” lyrics in a kids’s ebook.
That enterprise name didn’t result in a thaw. Afanasieff says it appears his contributions have been written out of Carey’s telling of the music’s creation. No co-writer was talked about throughout her “Good Morning America” interview final month.
“I was working on it by myself so I was writing on this little Casio keyboard, writing down words and thinking about, ‘What do I think about Christmas? What do I love? What do I want? What do I dream of?” she says. “And that’s what started it.”
On the time the music was written, Carey wasn’t a keyboard participant and didn’t know the best way to write music, Afanasieff has mentioned. Carey’s spokeswoman didn’t reply to an interview request.
Afanasieff sounds nearly bewildered by the flip of occasions. He told Variety in 1999 that each vacation season he has to defend himself towards individuals who don’t consider he co-wrote the music. He’s even gotten loss of life threats.
“Mariah has been very wonderful, positive and a force of nature,” he instructed Selection’s Chris Willman. “She’s the one that made the song a hit and she’s awesome. But she definitely does not share credit where credit is due. As a result, it has really hurt my reputation and, as a result, has left me with a bittersweet taste in my mouth.”
Final month, songwriters Andy Stone and Troy Powers sued Carey and Afanasieff in federal courtroom in California, in search of $20 million in copyright infringement and citing their very own 1989 nation music, “All I Want for Christmas is You.” They’d dropped a earlier effort.
Their music has an analogous theme, with a narrator needing a love curiosity earlier than Christmas comforts. The writers cite an “overwhelming likelihood” the Carey and Afanasieff had heard their music.
The 2 songs don’t have any musical similarities, Berklee’s Bennett says, and the theme is hardly distinctive. He identified Bing Crosby’s “You’re All I Want for Christmas,” Carla Thomas’ “All I Want for Christmas is You” and Buck Owens’ “All I Want for Christmas, Dear, is You.”
Says the musicologist: “It’s nonsense.”
The subsequent ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’?
In his podcast look, Afanasieff famous how Foster as soon as instructed him that “All I Want for Christmas is You” was the final music to enter the Christmas canon and “that vault is sealed.”
Foster instructed AP he exaggerated slightly, however not lots. Writing a brand new vacation music is brutally onerous, because you’re competing with not simply present hits however a whole lot of years of songs and recollections. The previous classics by no means go away. Solely 10 entries on Billboard’s final Sizzling 100 of vacation songs final 12 months have been written after “All I Want for Christmas is You.”
“I just stay away from them, because they scare me,” Foster says. “Lyrically, it’s sort of all been done before — better than I can ever do.”
A vacation album Foster and his spouse, Katharine McPhee, launched lately sticks with the requirements, plus Foster’s personal 1989 music, “Grown-Up Christmas List.”
A handful of extra modern songs have proven potential endurance, like Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” from 2014, Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree” from 2013, Gwen Stefani & Blake Shelton’s “You Make it Feel Like Christmas” from 2017 and Taylor Swift’s “Christmas Tree Farm” from 2019.
Whereas he appreciates Foster’s praise, Afanasieff instructed Rothschild that he hoped others don’t take it to coronary heart.
“I urge songwriters every year,” he says. “It’s time to write the next ‘All I Want for Christmas is You.’”
