All she wanted for Christmas was a No.1 hit
For Mariah Carey, this year’s Christmas season started promptly on Halloween night, just as the clock struck 12am and the calendar rolled over into November.
In a charmingly lo-fi skit posted to the singer’s social media channels, Carey falls asleep at 11.59pm in her costume (a hair-metal rock star) before being awakened at midnight (now wearing wintry pyjamas) by a call from Santa.
“It’s tiiiiiiiime,” Carey declares with a whistling scream.
So began the most spirited edition yet of the singer’s now-annual campaign to push All I Want For Christmas Is You, her 25-year-old seasonal hit, to the next level — again. On Monday, that mission was accomplished as the song reached an unprecedented industry pinnacle, hitting No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, becoming both the song that took the longest to do so and the first Christmas track to take the top spot since The Chipmunk Song 60 years ago.
All I Want For Christmas becomes Carey’s first No.1 since 2008 and her 19th overall — one fewer than The Beatles, the record holders. But it boasts by far the most miraculous journey, spanning three decades, with a surge in recent years thanks in part to a technology-driven shift in listener habits, including the ubiquity of holiday playlists, and renewed marketing muscle. Perhaps above all else, there is the sturdiness of the songwriting on what many consider to be a final modern entry into the Christmas song canon.
“There are the classics — the standards that everybody grew up with — and then there are the reinterpretations or new originals,” said Dave Bakula, a senior analyst for Nielsen Music. “Mariah lives in that sweet spot of both.”
“This song is not one of those things that decays year over year, with some old-style message,” he added. “It’s a simple, straight-ahead pop gem that just happens to be about Christmas.”
Carey, in an interview, demurred on the importance of hitting No.1.
“It’s something my die-hard fans think about, and people that are really close to me are talking to me about it literally all year,” she said. “But I don’t need something else to validate the existence of this song. I used to pick it apart whenever I listened to it, but at this point, I feel like I’m finally able to enjoy it.”
Beginning in 2014, Carey has performed a slate of Christmas shows anchored by the megahit, with stops in Las Vegas, Paris, London and Madrid; on Sunday, she closed this year’s run with a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden, performing All I Want For Christmas as a long-teased encore surrounded by 11 Christmas trees, a gospel choir, her two children, bursts of fake snow and, of course, Santa Claus.
Then there are the tie-ins: a children’s book (from 2015) and an animated film (2017), along with endless online content, from a GQ video in which Carey expounds on her love for Christmas to an Amazon Music mini-documentary on the song’s endurance. Last month, for the album’s 25th anniversary, Sony rereleased a deluxe edition of Merry Christmas with four different renditions of its big hit — leaving off the Justin Bieber duet version from 2011 — and a nearly metre-long printed timeline of the track’s lifespan.
But wait, there’s more. While the YouTube version of the song’s music video has been viewed some 600 million times since 2009, a new cut featuring archival footage was added this year, following a black-and-white cut from 2016 — all of which count toward the song’s chart placement.
The onslaught worked: All I Want For Christmas was the most-streamed song in the United States last week, with more than 45 million plays, up from 35 million the week prior. And while the track was pushed into the 21st century by a climactic performance in the 2003 holiday romcom Love Actually, which has enjoyed a similar populist long tail, its digital success has skyrocketed since 2014, as streaming has come to dominate how people listen to music.
Like most Christmas miracles, the song’s genesis is both contentious and shrouded in mystery.
Carey, who does not acknowledge her age or the passage of time, joked that when she wrote the song, she was “in the womb, darling”. The truth is that her label at the time, Columbia Records, had the idea for a Christmas album and that she initially balked. Carey was a young artist coming off her third album, Music Box, a commercial smash, and holiday collections were then considered an afterthought, for over-the-hill acts. “I’m not one to be giving all sorts of credit to record company executives,” Carey said, “but I do think it turned out to be a brilliant business move.”
According to the singer’s version of events, which has coalesced into nearmythic status over the years, All I Want
For Christmas first came to her alone at a house in upstate New York as she noodled on a Casio keyboard with It’s A Wonderful Life blasting in the background. She sang a melody and played a chord progression into a mini-tape recorder, she said, and later recorded a full arrangement with her frequent collaborator Walter Afanasieff.
Afanasieff, who produced My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion and worked with Carey on hits like Dreamlover and Hero, remembers things differently.
“I don’t know how to explain Mariah’s version of things. I know when I look at the song’s copyright — 50% to her, 50% to me — we both wrote the song,” he said. “I sat at the piano with Mariah in the room, and I started plunking out — like I always did, on every single song we’ve ever written together — a particular chord,” hitting upon the “boogie-woogie” piano that gives the song its driving momentum. (Afanasieff recalled this occurring in the Hamptons.)
Carey later finished lyrics, while Afanasieff composed the track, which consisted of no live instruments, on a digital keyboard sequencer. They recorded the song over the summer, decking the studio halls to get in the Christmas spirit.
“We just did whatever the hell we wanted, including this totally slow intro-verse that ends in the title of the song,” Afanasieff said, noting that the track does not even have a proper chorus. “There’s no rhyme or reason, it just worked out, even though it broke certain rules. I think that’s part of the reason it’s lived so long.”