Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You is an undeniable hit, and has officially been crowned the greatest holiday song of all time by Billboard.
So it’s funny to think that the song’s co-writer, Walter Afanasieff, wasn’t such a fan of the banger-to-be while creating it.
“At the time, I thought it was overly simple, and I really didn’t like it,” he shared with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in 2014, lamenting its “oversimplified melody.”
He didn’t like Mariah’s voice on the track either, telling Billboard in 2013: “My first reaction was, ‘That sounds like someone doing voice scales.’”
So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that he told Billboard in 2014 that he expected the song to be “no big deal.”
When asked whether he thought Mariah’s All I Want For Christmas Is You would be the standout song from her 1994 holiday album Merry Christmas, Walter simply responded: “Nooo.”
At the time of recording, “Christmas music and Christmas albums by artists weren’t the big deal that they are today,” he explained.
“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.”
Sharing that the pair didn’t have an “inkling” the song would have any staying power, Walter continued: “We were going to release it as kind of an everyday, ‘hey, you know, we’re putting out a Christmas album. No big deal.’”
He still doesn’t seem totally sure why the hot took off.
The songwriter and producer told Billboard that Christmas hits had become commonplace since the ’90s, but noted that All I Want For Christmas Is You seems to have stuck “for whatever reason.”
“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,” he said.
“It just closed.”
Nielsen Music says the song is the top-selling digital Christmas song of all time, so we’re not sure there’ll be much room for another tune to pop its Santa-hat-covered head in any time soon...
