“All I Want for Christmas is You” is a remarkable smash it from the 1990s. Mariah Carey wrote this fast-paced jingle Christmas song that can really get you in the holiday spirit.
“All I Want for Christmas Is You” is a song by American singer Mariah Carey from her fourth studio album and first holiday album, Merry Christmas (1994). Written and produced by Carey and Walter Afanasieff, the song was released as the lead single from the album on October 29, 1994, by Columbia Records. The track is an up-tempo love song that includes bell chimes, backing vocals, and synthesizers. It has received critical acclaim, with The New Yorker describing it as “one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon”. The song has become a Christmas standard, with a significant rise in popularity each December.
The song was a success when first released, reaching number six on the Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary chart in the United States and number two in the United Kingdom and Japan. The advent of music streaming has led to renewed success for the single, which now annually re-enters charts worldwide in the weeks before Christmas and has reached number one in over 25 countries, partially due to it being added to popular seasonal playlists.
The single has broken the record for the longest gap between release and reaching number one in both the United States and the United Kingdom, 25 and 26 years respectively. The song has sold 16 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling digital singles of all time. In 2023, the song was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.
Following the success of her 1993 album Music Box, Carey and her management at Columbia Records — including Carey’s then-husband, Tommy Mottola, head of Columbia’s parent label Sony Music Entertainment — began planning further projects. The group discussed recording a Christmas album, but hesitated, as such albums were typically released towards when artists’ careers are waning. Carey’s songwriting partner of over four years, Walter Afanasieff, 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. So we were going to release it as kind of an everyday, ‘Hey, you know, we’re putting out a Christmas album. No big deal.’
After Mottola persisted, Carey and Afanasieff began writing and composing songs for Merry Christmas in mid-1994. Carey decorated the home she shared with Mottola with Christmas decorations, feeling she could enter the holiday spirit and make her performance more authentic. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was recorded that August, and took Carey and Afanasieff a total of 15 minutes to write and compose.
Who wrote All I Want for Christmas Is You?
At first, Afanasieff admitted that he was puzzled and “blanched” as to where Carey wanted to take the melody and vocal scales, though she was “adamant” in her direction for the song. In an interview with Billboard, Afanasieff described the type of relationship he and Carey shared in the studio and as songwriters:
It was always the same sort of system with us. We would write the nucleus of the song, the melody primary music, and then some of the words were there as we finished writing it. I started playing some rock ‘n’ roll piano and started boogie woogie-ing my left hand, and that inspired Mariah to come up with the melodi ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas.’
And then we started singing and playing around with this rock ‘n’ roll boogie song, which immediately came out to be the nucleus of what would end up being ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You.’ That one went very quickly: 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.
Then for the next week or two Mariah would call me and say, ‘What do you think about this bit?’ We would talk a little bit until she got the lyrics all nicely coordinated and done. And then we just waited until the sessions began, which were in the summer of ’94 where we got together in New York and started recording. And that’s when we first hear her at the microphone singing, and the rest is history.
Afanasieff flew back to California, where he finished the song’s programming and production. Originally, he had a live band play the drums and other instruments with the thought of giving it a more raw and affective sound.
He was unhappy with the results of the recording and subsequently scrapped the effort and used his original, personal arrangement and programmed all the instruments heard on the song (with the exception of the background vocals) including the piano, effects, drums and triangle. While Carey continued writing material in her rented home in The Hamptons, Afanasieff completed the song’s programming and awaited to rendezvous with her a final time in order to layer and harmonize the background vocals.
In touching on several aspects of what excited her to record and release her Christmas album, Carey went into detail on what writing and recording the song and album meant for her, pointing out, “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.
When it came to the album, we had to have a nice balance between standard Christian hymns and fun songs. It was definitely a priority for me to write at least a few new songs, but for the most part people really want to hear the standards at Christmas time, no matter how good a new song is.”
