Mariah Carey And Her “All I Want For Christmas Is You” Co-Writer Butt Heads Over Claims That She Wrote The Song As A Child
Now that Mariah Carey has gathered her paycheck-stuffed sack to return to the North Pole, she apparently made the Naughty list during her 2022 run. It’s been a contentious year for Mariah, who first had to defend her self-proclaimed title of Queen of Christmas months before finally giving in and declaring Darlene Love the Queen of Christmas. Now, at the end of her Tinsel Tour, Mimi’s All I Want For Christmas Is You writing partner Walter Afanasieff threw her a little Christmas shade by refuting her claims that she wrote the song when she was little. And Mariah has provided some receipts claiming she didn’t say that, even though she actually did say that.
As Mariah’s yuletide yodel fades into the background for another twelve months, it will not go softly into the darkness of the silent night. According to The New York Post, Walter appeared on Hot Takes & Deep Dives with Jess Rothschild to discuss Mariah’s claims that she originally wrote the song when she was a little girl on a Casio keyboard. And Walter immediately slapped this claim down because not only could she have never created such a complicated arrangement on a Casio, but she also doesn’t have the knowledge to make that happen.
“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.
“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,” Afanasieff said.
“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 added on the podcast.
Now, Mariah did actually make this claim a few years ago, in 2017. During an interview with Billboard, she stated, “I am proud of this song that I wrote basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard.” But in an attempt to make Walter look like he’s the one telling tall tales, she posted a video to her IG story via Vh1 discussing the true origin story of the song.
“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 said at the time.
“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 better hightail it back to Santa’s workshop quickly to avoid any more behind-the-scenes tea ruining her legacy. Because this year, Walter remixed their song into “All I want for Christmas is for youuuuuuu to stop tellin’ lies!”
Pic: INSTARImages