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Mariah Carey wrote All I Want for Christmas as a child? “Tale fairy tales!” says the co

2022-12-25T09:12:57.908Z


Mariah Carey likes to claim that she composed her biggest hit, the eternal Christmas anthem »All I Want for Christmas Is You«, as a child. Walter Afanasieff has a completely different opinion – and shares it.


Enlarge image

US singer Mariah Carey at one of her Christmas concerts in New York's Times Square

Photo:

Brent N. Clarke / dpa

For once, it's not about the money, just the honor.

US singer Mariah Carey, 53, and songwriter Walter Afanasieff, 64, earn stupid and stupid every year when the Christmas song they wrote together storms the global charts again: both hold 50 percent of the songwriting credits , Afanasieff for the music, Carey for lyrics and melody.

"All I Want for Christmas Is You", released in 1994 on Carey's first Christmas album "Merry Christmas", has also been number one in Germany for weeks, even Wham!

do nothing.

The upbeat, uptempo song is a classic and an evergreen that broke numerous sales and chart records.

The New Yorker once ennobled him with the praise of being "one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon".

Enlarge image

Songwriter and producer Walter Afanasieff (2014 in Hollywood)

Photo: Paul Redmond/Getty Images

So everything could be as beautiful and harmonious as it should be for the holiday season, the prime time for the song.

But no: For several years now, the well-known US producer and songwriter Afanasieff, who won a Grammy for Celine Dion's "Titanic" smasher "My Heart Will Go On," has been complaining that Carey's collaboration on "All I Want for Christmas Is You« keeps playing down.

In fact, the singing diva claimed five years ago in the US magazine »Billboard« that she composed the song as a child at home on a Casio keyboard.

As early as 2019, Afanasieff complained that Carey was constantly diminishing his role, but that she no longer spoke to him.

"I want to talk about the song because I'm a co-writer, I own 50 percent of the song, we're equal co-writers, we're so lucky and I mean we're so blessed.

Still I can't call her.

She doesn't call me.

She continues to deny the existence of a co-writer on this song," he told Variety magazine at the time.

Now he's doing it again in a podcast - and aiming below the belt: when she suddenly started saying she had written the song when she was a little girl, he thought: "Why haven't you had it for 12, 13 or 15 years previously said?

That's just how it developed in her head," Afanasieff said on the program "Hot Takes & Deep Dives with Jess Rothschild," according to US media reports.

But that's not all: »She doesn't play anything.

She doesn't play keyboards or piano,” the songwriter sneered.

'She doesn't know anything about music, she doesn't know chord changes and she doesn't know music theory or anything like that.

She doesn't know how a diminished chord goes from a minor seventh to a major seventh." So her claim that as a kid she wrote a song with such a complicated chord structure with her fingers on a Casio keyboard, "is kind of fairy tales«, according to Afanasieff.

That summer, when he wrote "All I Want For Christmas," one of three songs together for the album, he "started playing a boogie-woogie, a kind of rock.

Mariah joined in and sang 'I don't want a lot for Christmas,'" Afanasieff said.

"It went on and on like this, and it was like a game of ping-pong."

Mariah Carey, who occasionally makes headlines because of her eccentricities rather than her music, has not yet commented on Afanasieff's allegations.

Nor is it to be expected.

In the documentary »Mariah Carey is Christmas: The Story of All I Want for Christmas is You«, she last implied in 2019 that she already had the now-famous song ready before she went into the studio with Afanasieff.

The truth?

Who knows.

In any case, Afanasieff seems to suffer from a permanent profile neurosis when it comes to what is probably his most successful work.

"I studied music, I have a degree in music," he said on the podcast, "I'm an accomplished orchestrator and arranger.

i teach music

I'm not a chump."

boron

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2022-12-25

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