Mariah Carey Says “All I Want for Christmas” Was Inspired by Her Dysfunctional Childhood
When Mariah Carey’s team asked her to release a holiday album in 1994, she didn’t think the time was right. “Originally, I was like, ‘This is a little bit too early in my career to do a Christmas album,’” she told USA Today. She ultimately decided to take the risk and produced Merry Christmas, the album that brought us the timeless hit “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”
Twenty-five years later, the iconic track is one of the best-selling singles of all time, having sold 16 million copies worldwide since its release, per Forbes, and it continues to top listening charts every holiday season. Last Christmas Eve, it broke Spotify’s record for most playtime in one day with 10.819 million streams. By the end of 2018, it occupied the third spot on Billboard’s Hot 100, making it the first holiday tune to surpass the top five in 60 years.
To celebrate 25 years of dancing to those catchy sleigh bells and powerful key changes, Carey has partnered with Amazon to release a mini-documentary set to release later this month, Mariah Carey Is Christmas, that tells the story of how the song came to be. She also partnered with Spotify to release an enhanced version of the classic album called All I Want For Christmas Is You Experience, and who knows, they might create enough buzz to finally take the track to number one.
“I would be thrilled,” Carey told USA Today of the possibility. “I wanted it to feel like a classic, but I didn’t know that it was going to actually become a classic. I say that humbly because Christmas music is something that’s really special to me, so to see the song’s popularity grow over the years has been something that’s been kind of amazing. I couldn’t have expected it.”
But how exactly did one of the biggest Christmas anthems of all time come to be? Carey says a number of surprising factors influenced her writing process.
Her dysfunctional childhood inspired the song.
Carey told USA Today that the songwriting process began in her upstate New York home shared with ex-husband Tommy Mottola. “I really started with thinking, ‘What are all the things I think about at Christmas?’ Lights, presents, stockings, fireplaces,” she said.
While alone at her keyboard, she found herself reminiscing about Christmases passed. “I’ve always loved Christmas so much my entire life, but I grew up not having a lot of money and not being able to experience it like the other kids did. I wanted Christmas to be perfect, but for a lot of different reasons, it didn’t always end up working out well, coming from such a dysfunctional family,” she said.
She opened up more to Cosmopolitan UK about her divorced parents, as well as siblings she no longer keeps in touch with. “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 said.
Now, the 49-year-old mom of twins makes up for the missed moments in her own home, and that energy is what ultimately inspired her music. “I want to make it magical for my kids. You know, I think it’s this kind of childlike love of Christmas that saved me.”
The music strives to echo The Jackson 5 and Phil Spector.
Before she knew it, Carey had written the song’s bridge, which she later presented in a studio session with co-writer and producer Walter Afanasieff. “I wrote the melody and lyrics; he played and did additional writing, which is great, but it’s my baby. It was my thing,” she told USA Today. “When we got together, I was like, ‘You know, I think it should start out slow, and then the music should come in and sort of have a Jackson 5, Phil Spector-type moment,’ if that makes sense. It was inspired by those songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s.”
The background vocals played a key role.
Each detail of the track’s arrangement was intentionally planned and executed—from its powerful drawn out notes to its slow rhythmic build—but Carey said the background vocals, of all things, are the proverbial bow on top.
“When I did the background vocals, that’s when I had the most fun in the studio—it’s the most festive part of the song,” she said. “A lot of people who have remade it don’t realize how important those parts were, in the way they were sung and how I arranged them. They added more flavor and made it a complete record.”
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