FEATURE:
Groovelines
Mariah Carey – All I Want for Christmas Is You
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PERHAPS the best and most celebrated…
PHOTO CREDIT: Dennis Leupold via USA Today
Christmas song ever, Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You often tops lists of the all-time classic festive gems. TimeOut deemed the song the very best last year; Good Housekeeping concurred this year; Cosmopolitan ranked it top this year too. A song that was released on 29th October, 1994, All I Want for Christmas Is You was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Recording Registry this year. I am going to come to its legacy and the reaction to it. For Groovelines, it is a chance to go deep with a song. I am going to get into a new lawsuit that has come about. A Christmas classic called into question regarding its originality. Before that, The Guardian discussed how Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You is being played extra-early this year. People finding comfort in a classic that provides joy and warmth:
“People who argue that Christmas seems to come earlier every year now have an important piece of evidence: the earliest ever appearance of Christmas songs in the UK Top 40.
We’re not halfway through November, but already the widely agreed-upon pair of greatest modern Christmas classics – Wham!’s Last Christmas and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You – have entered the chart at No 37 and No 40 respectively. Last year, it took until the third week of November for a Christmas song to appear, namely All I Want for Christmas Is You. Each song will now almost certainly remain in the chart for the rest of the year, and possibly early 2024.
The songs’ popularity has grown all the more via the network effect of the download and then streaming eras, with Last Christmas – originally a No 2 hit in 1984 – reappearing in the chart every year since 2008, eventually earning its first No 1 position in January 2021.
Released in 1994, All I Want for Christmas Is You also returned in 2008, and earned its first No 1 spot slightly before Wham!, in December 2020.
Further demonstrating the songs’ classic status is the fact there are no other Christmas hits even in the Top 100 this week, though by Christmas itself the charts will be dominated by them.
Twenty-nine entries in the UK Top 40 over Christmas 2022 were festive, with longstanding favourites such as Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York joined by a more recent established canon of favourites by Michael Bublé, Ariana Grande, Kelly Clarkson and Justin Bieber.
Neither Last Christmas nor All I Want for Christmas Is You has held the actual Christmas No 1 spot, which in recent years has been dominated by YouTube star LadBaby and his series of singles to benefit food bank charity the Trussell Trust. His fifth chart-topper, 2022’s Food Aid, broke the Beatles’ record for the most Christmas No 1s. He has not announced whether he’ll attempt a sixth No 1 in a row this year.
The festive glow of All I Want for Christmas Is You has been slightly dulled this year as Mariah Carey has been served with a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement over the song”.
There is some controversy that has blighted the magnificent and all-conquering classic. Again, going to The Guardian, we learn that this legendary song has been challenged. A lot of big artists find themselves on the end of lawsuits. Cynically, you tend to find them occurring when a song becomes massive and makes a lot of money. I am not sure what the result will be of All I Want for Christmas Is You’s challenge:
“Mariah Carey has been sued over alleged copyright infringement with her perennial festive hit All I Want For Christmas Is You.
As reported in Billboard, it is the second lawsuit she has faced from songwriter Andy Stone – who performed under the name Vince Vance – who filed then withdrew a similar claim in 2022.
Stone released a similarly lovelorn song of the same name in 1989 with his group Vince Vance & the Valiants, reaching No 52 in the US country singles chart in 1994 after receiving extensive radio play during Christmas 1993. Carey’s song was recorded and released in 1994.
Stone’s lawsuit claims: “The phrase ‘all I want for Christmas is you’ may seem like a common parlance today, in 1988 it was, in context, distinctive […] Moreover, the combination of the specific chord progression in the melody paired with the verbatim hook was a greater than 50% clone of [Stone’s] original work, in both lyric choice and chord expressions.”
Stone is being represented by Gerard P Fox, a lawyer who represented two songwriters in a similar copyright infringement case against Taylor Swift and her song Shake It Off, which resulted in an undisclosed settlement in 2022.
Carey has not responded to the lawsuit. The Guardian has contacted her management company for comment.
Carey co-wrote the song with Walter Afanasieff, though each of them has described the circumstances differently.
In 2021, Carey said: “When I first wrote that song I was very, very early on in my career and I was still thinking about childhood stuff when I did wish for snow every year … I started writing that on a little DX7 or Casio keyboard that was in this little room in the house that I lived in at the time in upstate New York lifetimes ago. Just writing down everything that I thought about. All the things that reminded me of Christmas that made me feel festive that I wanted other people to feel”.
I am going to come to some articles about, arguably, the queen of Christmas songs. I am going to drop in some reception for All I Want for Christmas Is You. Even though I tend to go for Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody as the champion Christmas classic, Mariah Carey’s 1994 wonder is in the top three for sure! It has been embraced and celebrated through the years:
"All I Want for Christmas Is You" received universal acclaim. Roch Parisien from AllMusic called the song "a year-long banger", complimenting its instrumentation and melody. Steve Morse, editor of The Boston Globe, wrote that Carey sang with a lot of soul. In his review for Carey's Merry Christmas II You, Thomas Connor from the Chicago Sun-Times called the song "a simple, well-crafted chestnut and one of the last great additions to the Christmas pop canon". Shona Craven of Scotland's The Herald, said, "[it's] a song of optimism and joy that maybe, just maybe, hints at the real meaning of Christmas." Additionally, she felt the main reason it was so successful is the subject "you" in the lyrics, explaining, "Perhaps what makes the song such a huge hit is the fact that it's for absolutely everyone." Craven opened her review with a bold statement: "Bing Crosby may well be turning in his grave, but no child of the 1980s will be surprised to see Mariah Carey's sublime All I Want For Christmas Is You bounding up the charts after being named the nation's top festive song." While reviewing the 2009 remix version, Becky Bain from Idolator called the song a "timeless classic" and wrote, "We love the original song to pieces—we blast it while decorating our Christmas tree and lighting our Menorah."
Kyle Anderson from MTV labeled the track "a majestic anthem full of chimes, sleigh bells, doo-wop flourishes, sweeping strings and one of the most dynamic and clean vocal performances of Carey's career". Music & Media commented, "Phil Spector's Christmas album has been the main inspiration for this carol in a "Darlene Love against the wall of sound" tradition." Music Week wrote, "Mariah meets Phil Spector, some chimes and the inevitable sleigh-bells; this is everything you would expect from a Mariah Carey record." In a 2006 retrospective look at Carey's career, Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker said, the "charming" song was one of Carey's biggest accomplishments, calling it "one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon". Dan Hancox, editor of The National, quoted and agreed with Jones's statement, calling the song "perfection". According to Barry Schwartz from Stylus Magazine, "to say this song is an instant classic somehow doesn't capture its amazingicity; it's a modern standard: joyous, exhilarating, loud, with even a hint of longing." Schwartz praised the song's lyrics as well, describing them as "beautifully phrased," and calling Carey's voice "gorgeous" and "sincere”.
I will delve into the history of All I Want for Christmas Is You prior to coming to its legacy and importance. The song is credited to Walter Afanasieff and Mariah Carey (songwriting and production). A song with an interesting chart ride and release history, there is this fascinating background and history of All I Want for Christmas Is You. One of the biggest questions is to the song’s origin and creation. Who the song belongs to and how it came about:
“Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has been one of music’s most recognizable singles—holiday or otherwise—going on three decades now.
Carey’s 1994 hit is considered the defining modern Christmas classic, with Billboard ranking it No. 1 on its list of the Greatest of All Time Holiday 100 Songs—ahead of legendary vocalists like Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee, and Nat King Cole. Thanks to streaming services and the song’s ubiquitous presence in pop culture, it has received billions of plays in its lifetime.
But while “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has become an essential part of the winter season—and earned the 53-year-old Carey the unofficial title of “Queen of Christmas”—its history is more complicated than you might think.
Carey loved Christmas, but her family would “ruin it”
“All I Want for Christmas Is You” is a cheery and boisterous ode to Christmas, not to mention a yuletide crush. It’s also a sharp contrast to Carey’s melancholic experiences around the holidays while growing up.
Mariah was raised on New York’s Long Island and was part of a complicated family dynamic. Her parents—Alfred Roy Carey, a Venezuelan aeronautical engineer, and Patricia Carey, a voice coach and opera singer—divorced when young Mariah was 3 years old. She grew up primarily with her mother. Mariah has detailed their complicated relationship, suggesting in her 2020 memoir that Patricia resented her because of her musical ability. The singer also no longer speaks to her brother, Morgan, nor her sister, Alison.
Although Carey looked forward to Christmas every year, she said in 2019 that her “dysfunctional family” and financial struggles in childhood often overshadowed her excitement. “I always wanted to have a really good time at Christmas, and they would ruin it, so I vowed in my own life I would make sure every Christmas was great,” she told Cosmopolitan UK.
One silver lining was that Carey began writing poems and songs to process her feelings—a practice that helped her quickly become a music megastar.
The singer didn’t want to do a Christmas album
By 1994, Carey was a bona fide hitmaker with eight No. 1 singles to her credit. That included the songs “Vision of Love,” “Emotions,” and “Dreamlover.” So when her record label suggested she compose a holiday album, 24-year-old Carey was hesitant because she felt Christmas music was reserved for artists later in their careers—after their relevance had tailed off.
“I was like, ‘Hmm, I don’t know.’ It seemed a little premature, like I was jumping the gun,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2020. “The success of [the Merry Christmas album] was definitely a surprise. I mean, ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ was the first Christmas song I ever wrote.”
The pop star first told Billboard in 2017 that she wrote the song “basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard.” In the 2019 Amazon documentary Mariah Carey Is Christmas: The Story of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” the singer gave a similar account. “Actually, I put on It’s a Wonderful Life downstairs, 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,” she explained.
The song quickly became popular but not an immediate chart-topper when it was released as a single in October 1994. In fact, Merry Christmas was the second-best-selling new holiday album of 1994. The top was Miracles—The Holiday Album by famed saxophonist Kenny G. But Carey’s multiplatinum album more than made up for it over time, selling the equivalent of 8 million copies by December 2020. “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is now a diamond-certified single, reaching 12 million downloads and streaming equivalents in December 2022.
The song’s origin is disputed
Walter Afanasieff is credited as a co-writer of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and has rebuffed Mariah Carey’s story of the song’s origin.
Carey is credited as a co-writer and co-producer of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” with Walter Afanasieff. However, their explanations behind the song’s creation are wildly different.
Afanasieff calls Carey’s story “kind of a tall tale.” According to the longtime songwriter, he and Carey—who had previously collaborated for her albums Emotions (1991) and Music Box (1993)—constructed the song together in the summer of 1994 at a home she was renting with then-husband Tommy Mottola. “I started playing a boogie-woogie, kind of a rock. Mariah chimed in and started singing ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas,’” he said. “So on and on, and it was like a game of ping-pong. I’d hit the ball for her, she hits it back to me.” Ultimately, Afanasieff credits Carey with the lyrics and melodies and says he managed “all of the music and the chords.”
Afanasieff’s insistence has drawn the ire of some of Carey’s most devoted fans. The composer told Variety in 2019 he and his wife, comedian Katie Cazorla, have even received death threats for speaking out about his perceived snub from the singer. Although Afanasieff says he would work with Carey again in a heartbeat, he maintains that her comments have damaged his reputation. “Mariah has been very wonderful, positive, and a force of nature. She’s the one that made the song a hit, and she’s awesome,” he said. “But she definitely does not share credit where credit is due”.
On 28th October, 1994, Mariah Carey released her first holiday album, Merry Christmas. It features mainly standards that she interprets. They sit alongside original material. Like most Christmas albums, it got mixed reception. It was released between 1993’s Music Box and 1995’s Daydream. This was an imperial and purple patch for Carey. Although Music Box did not get great reception when it was released, it has since been reassessed and seen as very important. Daydream is one of her most acclaimed albums. What might have otherwise been a stopgap and change of pace between conventional albums was given a distinct lease of life by All I Want for Christmas Is You. In 2020, Ringer explored Mariah Carey’s classic. A song a lot sadder than you think, it came at a time when the U.S. legend was facing difficulty and problems of her own:
“It’s time. It’s time meaning it’s December. December belongs to Mariah Carey. What are the essential new Christmas songs released in Mariah Carey’s lifetime? “Last Christmas” by Wham. “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney. (It’s a great song. I’m not arguing with you about this.) “Christmas in Hollis” by Run-DMC. “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses. (You know it.) And “All I Want for Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey. That’s the list. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” came out in 1994 and sounds several eons older than that, in the best way. On impact—the very first time you heard Mariah belt out that very first chorus—it sounded classic, it sounded timeless, it sounded like it was playing in the manger when Jesus Christ was born.
And it’s an incredibly sad song. I’m not trying to ruin “All I Want for Christmas Is You” for you. Quite the contrary. I’m trying to heighten it. I’m trying to deepen it. The question before us today is who was the you in “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” I fear that the answer, as Mariah Carey tells her story now, is that there was no you. There was nobody. She had nobody, really. This song is a fantasy. This song is aspirational. This song is a reminder that pop music—and maybe especially Christmas-themed pop music—can be as transportive for the singer (and the songwriter) as it is for the listener. I’m trying to give you a sense, for mid-’90s Mariah Carey anyway, of what the fates allowed, and what they did not allow”.
I am going to end with a TIME feature about the song from 2019. Celebrating twenty-five years of this genius and unstoppable work of brilliance, they talked about All I Want for Christmas Is You as the holiday gift that keeps on giving:
“The melody of ‘All I Want For Christmas’ is astoundingly complicated considering how simple it seems,” songwriter and And the Writer Is… podcast host Ross Golan tells TIME. “The brain latches on songs after the listener invests significant time to learn them. That song in particular is now neurologically built into the zeitgeist.”
This, of course, attests to Carey’s skills as a songwriter, a factor that’s often overshadowed by her outstanding talent and larger-than-life persona. Lest listeners forget while listening to her hit the whistle register, Carey wrote 17 of her 18 #1 hits, a feat that astounds on multiple levels.
“This song is a testament to something that Mariah Carey is still undervalued for: Her songwriting,” beauty writer and self-professed lifelong Lamb (for the uninitiated, Lambs or the “Lambily” are the devoted fans of Carey) Tynan Sinks tells TIME. “Mariah Carey wrote this song, dude. Isn’t that crazy? It’s such a classic that people think it’s a cover of something else, but it’s a Mariah Carey original, baby. She just sat down one day and literally invented Christmas.”
In 2015, Slate reported that the song’s seemingly magic ability to put you in a festive holiday mood is actually because of its dulcet harmony, which contains at least 13 distinct chords, including a specific minor subdominant chord, which they dub “the most Christmassy chord of all” and is found in songs like Irving Berlin’s classic “White Christmas.”
In a deep dive into the song’s structure at Quartz, musicologist and Switched on Pop podcast host Nate Sloan also revealed that since Carey was inspired by old school holiday music, she used an AABA song structure that was popular in the 1940s and 1950s and that was used for songs like “Frosty the Snowman” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which can do plenty for holiday nostalgia for the good ‘ol days.
Unlike “Rudolph” and “Frosty,” however, Carey’s track provides a more adult take on a Christmas song, which also proved to be a boon. By eschewing children-centric holiday iconography like Santa and Rudolph for Carey’s trademark musical subject, love and romance, she reached a whole new — and very large — demographic with a theme that everyone could identify with.
“It’s not a religious song,” Andrew Mall, assistant professor of music at Northeastern Univeristy tells TIME. “She talks about Christmas, but no religious beliefs. It’s actually a love song. Anyone can inhabit those lyrics; the lover is not named, the lover is not gendered, so anyone can put themselves in that position as needing someone to love at the holidays. It’s a secular love song and not a religious Christmas carol.” Mall also attributes the song’s popularity to nostalgia of another kind: for the ’90s as a whole, especially the music of the time.
“The song came out in 1994, her first Christmas album; I think when people talk about nostalgia for this album, they talk about nostalgia for the holidays. I think that’s part of that, but I also think it’s part of a larger nostalgia for music from the ‘90s,” he said, noting that ’90s music, stuff he had been listening to in high school, has been showing up of late in his Spotify playlists and are part of a larger trend of things like ’90s dance parties and DJ sets. “This is an ongoing thing not only for people at the end of Gen X, but for millennials too. It’s not only nostalgia for the holidays, which can be fraught for a lot of people, but for the ‘90s, which you can wipe clean and put whatever kind of identity on that.”
The ‘Love, Actually’ Fact
“All I Want for Christmas” can also attribute some of its dominance during the holiday season to its inclusion in the film, Love, Actually. In the film, Sam, a young boy who plays the drums for a school performance of the song harbors a crush on his classmate, Joanna, who is singing lead; the song plays a significant role to this plotline, which helps open and close the film. Jocelyn Neal, a professor of music at UNC Chapel Hill, points to how both the song and movie have solidified their places in the holiday canon.
“It’s important to consider the use of it in the Christmas movie Love, Actually, which came out less than 10 years after the song was released,” Neal tells TIME. “Love, Actually has become for many middle-class Americans, a sort of holiday ritual to watch that movie, it’s in continuous holiday replay and so you have this song that was by this enormously successful pop star in the ‘90s, it has enough rhythm and blues in it to have that edgy sound for a 1990s to mid-’90s hit, and then a little less than a decade later, it’s going to get this boost by being in this now-classic Christmas movie as a key plot point, so it gets new life through that. There also just aren’t other recordings [is “of” accurate here?] original Christmas songs that sound modern but trigger that nostalgic elements. There aren’t a lot of other competitors when you line up those factors.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Part of the legacy of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” also lies within how it’s also posited Carey as the undisputed Queen of Christmas, something she has unabashedly and wholly embraced — although that wasn’t the case when the album was being made. In an interview with Billboard, Afanasieff said that making a Christmas album was hardly a boon to a contemporary artist like Carey at the time.
“20 years ago, Christmas music and Christmas albums by artists weren’t the big deal that they are today,” he said. “Back then, you didn’t have a lot of artists with Christmas albums; It wasn’t a known science at all back then, and there was nobody who did new, big Christmas songs.
And if there’s any doubt that Carey and “All I Want for Christmas Is You” are losing clout this holiday season, consider this: Spotify streams of the song have already seen a 99% increase since October 1st of this year, with the company projecting that the streams will “ramp up substantially” in November (last year, Spotify saw an increase in streams of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” of 2,077% between October and December). It seems that the holiday season — and Mariah season — has arrived”.
Even if the song is facing legal issues now – maybe someone being opportunistic or genuine -, there is no doubt that All I Want for Christmas Is You is Mariah Carey’s. Not only is it one of the best Christmas songs ever. It is one of the finest tracks of her career. We are starting to hear it at the moment in shops. It is going to be a chart success this year; reaching new people and setting records. Despite a slight black cloud hanging over it at the moment, All I Want for Christmas Is You is abound with light and joy – in spite of the fact it has quite a sad message. Both simple and complex at the same time, there is no doubt it is a classic for a reason! I doubt any new Christmas song can ever match Mariah Carey’s classic – one that turns thirty next year. I think we will be enjoying and talk about this track…
FOR decades more.