Huge furore erupts over Mariah Xmas song

All she wants for Christmas is for certain people to stop being ‘ridiculous.’

Mariah Carey is pouring leftover eggnog all over her former collaborator’s claims that she tells an “alternate story” of how “All I Want for Christmas” came to be.

Carey’s former co-producer and co-writer Walter Afanasieff controversially told the “Hot Takes & Deep Dives with Jess Rothschild” podcast recently that stories of the singer writing the hit Christmas song on her Casio keyboard as a child were nothing more than tall tales.

Now, Carey, 52, hopes to set the record straight.

“Mariah has never claimed to write ‘All I Want for Christmas’ by herself or as a child. She has always credited Walter, as he is cited as a writer on the song, so that would be ridiculous,” Carey’s rep told The Post.

“Not sure where that rumour came from, but Mariah is very respectful of writers and the craft, as she is a songwriter herself.”

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The songstress threw shade at her one-time song partner by posting a vintage clip from VH1 to her Instagram story that shows a clip of her from 1994 explaining the behind-the-scenes of the writing of “All I Want for Christmas.”

“I was up at the farm, upstate where we did the video, and it was night-time, 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.”

Afanasieff, 64, said the two of them were originally on the same page about the song — but about 10 years ago, there was suddenly an “alternate story” being told.

“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.

Carey did in fact tell Billboard in 2017 that she came up with the song when she was just a kid.
 

“I am proud of this song that I wrote basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard,” she said at the time.

Afanasieff attacked the chart-topping diva, claiming that the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter is actually musically challenged.

“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.

Afanasieff said he and Carey came up with the song together while working on three songs for her Christmas album, “Merry Christmas.”

“We were holed up in this beautiful home that [Mariah was] renting, and it was the summertime and there was a piano. So the writing of ‘All I Want for Christmas’ is, I started playing a boogie-woogie, kind of a rock,” he said while making the sound of the bassline.

The producer charged that he was playing the piano when Carey starting singing, “I don’t want a lot for Christmas.”

“So on and on, and it was like a game of ping-pong. I’d hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me,” he said.

Afanasieff said the singer was responsible for the melodies and lyrics while he took charge of the music and chords.

Both Afanasieff and Carey are equally credited for the hit Christmas song, with no other writers or producers.

They worked together on a number of her studio albums, including “Emotions” and “Music Box”.

Afanasieff’s comments weren’t the only controversial moment for the modern Christmas classic in 2022. A lawsuit was filed in New Orleans federal court in June on behalf of the creators of the identically titled 1989 song “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” recorded by Vince Vance and the Valiants. That tune was covered in 2020 by Kelly Clarkson, who told Billboard she’d been singing the song “since she was a kid.”

The lawsuit was dropped November 1.

Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was released in 1994 and continues to make its way to the top of the charts every holiday season.

This article was originally published by the New York Post and reproduced with permission