In a podcast interview, he says the duo wrote the song together and have always been seen as equally involved in its creation – but about ten years ago, Carey’s version of how the tune was born began to change.
— She began to hint that “I wrote this song as a child,” but why did she never say that twelve, 13, or 15 years ago? This has only developed into a truth, according to a resentful Afanasieff New York Post.
“So proud”
In an interview with the newspaper Billboard In 2017, Mariah Carey said that she wrote the lyrics and melody in childhood.
— I am so proud of this song that I wrote as a child on my little Casio keyboard.
Walter Afanasieff has written several songs, including “Hero” and “Forever”, together with the singer. Despite this, he believes that Mariah Carey is not particularly musically talented.
— She can’t play any instruments, neither keyboard nor piano. She does not understand the structure of music, how it works with chord changes and knows nothing about music theory. So to claim that she wrote a song with a complicated chord structure on her toy piano as a child is a huge exaggeration, he says.
Became a ping pong match
Instead, he tells his version of how perhaps the world’s most popular Christmas song was born.
— We had rented a house, this was during the summer, to record songs for her Christmas album. There was a piano and I started playing a boogie-woogie loop, a little rock ‘n’ roll. She sang “I don’t want a lot for christmas” and it became a bit like a game of ping-pong – we bounced the lyrics and the music back and forth.
Recently, Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff won a battle in a copyright case over “All I want for Christmas is you,” in which a country musician sued the songwriters for stealing the title.