Mariah Carey can eat off her 1994 seasonal hit "All I Want For Christmas Is You" for the rest of her life.
In fact, it just set the all-time record for Spotify streams in a day on this Christmas Eve.
While Mariah is a pretty renowned songwriter, she didn't write the track on her own.
Now her co-writer Walter Afanasieff has blasted her for implying that she did.
She started to hint at the fact that, ‘Oh, yeah, 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,” the producer argued on a recent podcast. “But 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.”
“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."
In 2017, Mariah told Billboard “I am proud of this song that I wrote basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard.”
Mariah's rep pushed back on Afanasieff's take.
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.” The rep added, Not ‘sure where that rumor came from, but Mariah is very respectful of writers and the craft, as she is a songwriter herself.”