It’s already rising to the top of Spotify, YouTube and Billboard charts — and it’s not even Christmas yet.
Yep, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is back for its seasonal run,topping the Billboard Hot 100 for the fourth week in a row.
The song annually tops the list ofmost-streamed holiday songsand is officially the most-downloaded holiday single of all time.According to Tech Times, it’s also the 11th-highest-selling single of all time and has earned more than $50 million for Carey and cowriter Walter Afanasieff. It is, bar none, the most enduring modern Christmas “standard” of our time, and I personally guarantee you’re hearing it in your head right now. That is its power.
Afanasieff was one of Carey’s trusted collaborators in 1994. He’d previously worked with her on “Love Takes Time,”EmotionsandMusic Box, andrecalled toBillboardin 2014that work on Carey’s Christmas album initially started in 1993.
“Then,” Afanasieff recalled, “we started to write what Mariah wanted to do and what Tommy [Mottola, the CEO of Sony and Carey’s then-husband] wanted to do which was a Phil Spector, old rock ‘n’ roll, sixties-sounding Christmas song.”
“I’m a very festive person and I love the holidays. I’ve sung Christmas songs since I was a little girl. I used to go Christmas caroling,”Carey said at the time. “I wrote it just out of love for Christmas and like really loving Christmas music,”she added in 2015. But it was Carey’s knowledge of music history that made the song’s unique mix of elements work. “I listen to a lot of old R&B and I listen to a lot of gospel music for inspiration,”she said in 1994. “I also listen to the radio, and I know every song on the radio because I’m a fanatic about that.”
“I stared playing some rock ‘n’ roll piano and started boogie woogie-ing my left hand,” Afanasieff recalled. Carey joined in with the first line, “I don’t want a lot for Christmas,” and the song was off to the races. Initially, Carey’s melody faced some resistance from her co-writer, though: “My first reaction was, ‘That sounds like someone doing voice scales,’ ”Afanasieff toldBusiness Insiderin 2013. “‘Are you sure that’s what you want?'”
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Carey persisted, and the work continued for a few hours. “She would sing a melody and I would do a chord change,”he continued toBI.“It was almost like a game of ping-pong, back and forth, until we had it.”
“That one went very quickly,”he explained toBillboard. “It was an easier song to write than some of the other ones. It was very formulaic; not a lot of chord changes. I tried to make it a little more unique, putting in some special chords that you really don’t hear a lot of, which made it unique and special.”
Afanasieff wasn’t alone in his mistrust of the setup. In his bookHitmaker: The Man and His Music, Tommy Mottola — who was the then-24-year-old Carey’s husband (he has a cameo as Santa in the song’s video) —remembered his wife’s resistanceto the cover art to the Christmas album. “What are you trying to do, turn me into Connie Francis?” Carey reportedly told him.
“It’s a Christmas song, but it has no religious content,”Andrea Dresdale of ABC News Radio toldVogueof “All I Want”‘s eternal popularity in 2015. “In reality, it’s just a love song. Everybody understands longing, desire, love, or just missing somebody. It’s an upbeat song. So many Christmas songs are not. Many of them are ballads, some of them are depressing, but this one sounds like a party.”
“It’s not like no one writes Christmas songs — everyone is trying to get a Christmas song,”he toldBillboard. “But for whatever reason ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ just became that song. It’s kind of something you never would have thought, and you can’t really explain why, and we feel lucky, because it was the last major song to enter that Christmas canon, and then the door slammed shut.”
Afanasieff also gaveBIone last piece of advice about the song: “The last thing I would tell a record company is to make another ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You.’ ”
Oh, and if you needed any more evidence of “All I Want”‘s appeal, it literally seems to work on an interspecies level. In 2010, a British goat farmerfound out that his goats produced more milkwhen played a loop of Carey’s hit. Apparently “The Chipmunk Song” had the opposite effect, so consider those two the yin and yang of “Christmas songs that promote goat milk production,” if that’s a category anyone’s keeping track of.
“The fact that [Mariah] was able to write a song that broke through and became the modern Christmas classic proved what a talented songwriter she is,” Dresdale added. “It also allowed her to brand herself as the Queen of Christmas. She’s turned Christmas into a cottage industry. This song really was one of the greatest things that ever happened to Mariah Carey.”
Well, Carey and the world at large. Her and Afanasieff’s creation is, literally, after more than 25 years, all we want, whether we know it or not.
source: people.com
