60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Mariah Carey—“All I Want for Christmas Is You”

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Rob explores Mariah Carey’s modern classic Christmas anthem “All I Want for Christmas Is You” by discussing the transcendent vocalist’s tumultuous early life and career, her oft-overlooked songwriting prowess, and how the song builds on the long canon of Christmas music. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Kyla Marshell Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm-fm-f-M-C-H-O-R-F-M-U-S-I-I-C-A-N-D-T-A-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. The best Christmas songs are the same. saddest. I assume you're up on this. Charlie Brown taught us this back in 1965. Listen to these kids.

What happened to these kids? Yeah, happiness and cheer. It's like they're serenading a mountain of coal. I love that song so much. I love a Charlie Brown Christmas. Best Christmas album of all time. Rest in peace, Vince Guraldi. Rest in peace, Charles Schultz. Rest in peace. My childhood. And that's it. That's what makes the best Christmas albums so sad the way time passes through them. Second best Christmas album, John Denver and the Muppets, a Christmas together. A couple years back, I had a galactically emo moment with Rolf singing,

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Through the years we all will be together. If the face alone. It's not until you're like 35 that if the fates allow even registers. It's all I'm going to say. Too mellow for you? Fine. Darling, love.

Christmas, baby, please come home. Listen to how hard she's singing. It's a very technical, musical, musical term, how loud she is. Imagine the physical distance, the miles, the states, the countries, the continents, the solar systems. Between her and the person she's singing. to. This song is older than a Charlie Brown Christmas, and her baby still ain't made it home. And so, yes, by comparison, you hear the jackhammer piano, you hear the sleigh bells, you hear the drum roll, and you hear Mariah Carey sing the word you, just the word you, and it's exuberance

personified. It's Christmas personified. It's Christmas as a child personified. Because no matter what or no matter who tries to stop her, year after year after year after year, Mariah Carey always makes it home. My name is Rob Harvilla. I'm a music critic at The Ringer, and this is 60 songs that explain the 90s. It's time. It's time, meaning it's December. December belongs to Mariah Carey. What are the essential new Christmas songs released in Mariah Carey's lifetime? Last Christmas by Wham! Wonderful Christmas Time by Paul McCartney. It's a great song.

I'm not arguing with you about this. Christmas and Hollis by Run DMC. Christmas rapping by the waitresses. You know it. And all I want for Christmas is you by Mariah Carey. That's the list. All I want for Christmas is you came out in 1994 and sounds several eons older than that. that in the best way on impact. The very first time you heard Mariah belt out, that very first

chorus, it sounded classic, it sounded timeless. It sounded like it was playing in the manger when Jesus Christ was born. And it's an incredibly sad song. I'm not trying to ruin all I want for Christmas is you for you. Quite the contrary. I'm trying to heighten it. I'm trying to deepen it. The question before us today is who was the you and all I want for Christmas is you. I fear that the answer, as Mariah Carey tells her story now, is that there was no you. There was nobody. She had nobody, really. This song is a fantasy.

The song is aspirational. The song is a reminder that pop music, and maybe especially Christmas-themed pop music, can be as transportive for the singer and the songwriter as it is for the listener. I'm trying to give you a sense, for mid-90s Mariah Carey, anyway, of what the fates allowed and what they did not allow. For starters, and this is important to remember, mid-90s Mariah Carey is rich and famous. Not unprecedentedly so, but pretty close. She was born and mostly raised in Long Island. Her self-titled debut album came out in 1990.

She was 21 years old. Mariah Carey, the album, spent 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard. board album chart, spawned four number one singles, ultimately sold 15 million copies worldwide, and won her two Grammys, including for Best New Artist. She's won five Grammys total. Mariah Carey, so far in her 30-year career, if ever there's cause to be offended on someone's behalf because they've only won five Grammys, now's the time. I have used this clip already in another episode of this show, but here it comes again, because the end of Someday, one of her first big hits was like a bejewed hand reaching out of your car radio and vigorously slapping you in the

face. Ah yes, the fabled whistle register, the apex of her fabled five octave range. I think of Mariah Kerry is the Eddie Van Halen of 90s pop vocalists, astounding technical ability but bent to the service of equally astounding songs, pop songs. Eddie had finger tapping, had shredding. Mariah has the whistle register and of course has melisma, which is when you turn a one syllable word into a 35 syllable word. But at their respective heights, these two people

were never just showing off. It's the difference between stunts and hooks. Over her first few blockbuster albums, you can hear Mariah honing her craft, but in a way that feels effortless and natural and graspable. Each one of those 35 syllables tells a story.

Each syllable is necessary. So on the number one hit title track to her second album, 1991's Emotions. Again, you get the whistle register near the end, but now it's the best and brightest hook in the whole song. And on Dream Lover, the number one hit and lead single to her third album, 1993's Music Box, there's yet another whistle register riff that's the best part of the whole song, but now it's expertly layered within her own backing vocals, and the word please divide it into like 35 syllables, and a bunch of do-do-doos for good measure. There's a lot going on here, but it's all going on for a reason. This is an empty

technique. Everything is in its right place. Also in 1993, Mariah Carey married Tommy Mattoa, the chairman and CEO of her record label, Sony Music. Tommy, it appears, was not the dream lover in question. Not a happy marriage. For more on this topic, I refer you to her autobiography, the meaning of Mariah Carey, co-written with Michaela Angela Davis and Paul. published in September 2020. Not a happy book. It is bleak, man. It is Dickensian.

It's like an Oliver Twist at a five-octave range. It was the worst of times, and then she married Tommy Motowa. As pop star memoirs go, the meaning of Mariah Carey is fabulous. Fabulous, both italicized and not italicized. If you're in it for the gossip, for the diva, if it all, you're in good bejeweled hands. There's a certain dishy intimacy. Mariah refers to you, the reader, as dolling with an H, italicized several times. I had never seen the word extravaganza typed in all caps and italicized, and I'm glad that this was the context in which I first saw that.

My single favorite sentence in this book is a parenthetical that reads, Some of the names have been changed to protect the dickheads, but it's bleak. Mariah's mother was a white opera singer of Irish descent whose family disowned her for marrying Mariah's black father. They divorced when Mariah was little, and she struggled growing up with her biracial identity. She writes, My first encounters with racism were like a first kiss in reverse. She endures a barrage of racial slurs from her white classmates. There's another agonizing scene where she's afraid to dance for her grandmother, her father's mother,

because of Mariah dances poorly, that might prove she's not her father's daughter. She's not really black. As she grew as a singer and a songwriter, she would grapple directly with this feeling of displacement of not truly belonging to anything or anyone in her songs, including a 1997 slow jam called Outside. Mariah has an older brother and an older sister and has long been estranged from both. Her childhood is rife with poverty and family discord and neglect. an abuse that sometimes turned physical.

Near the end of the book, having described all that trauma and agonizing detail throughout, she summarizes it like this. I was a little girl who lived in shacks, who always felt unsafe, undercared for, lonely, and perpetually scared. So that little girl gets rich and famous, and she fares justifiably that her family now views her primarily as a bank role. In fact, Mariah says now that she married the swathing, and terrifying and all-powerful Tommy Motola, not so much for love, but because he could protect her from her own family. But Tommy's idea of protection was to lock her away. It's a fairy tale romance in the Rapunzel sense. The happy newlyweds owned a multi-million dollar mansion at upstate Bedford, New York,

that Mariah's husband transformed into a luxurious panopticon, guards, cameras, intercom, so his voice could follow her everywhere. Mariah refers to this house as Sing Sing, as in the prison. She was always being watched if she was never allowed to leave on her own. There's a very silly and also profoundly sad scene in the book where Mariah's in her fancy home studio recording with the rapper De Brat, and they concoct this elaborate Ocean's 11 type scheme to sneak out, jump into one of Mariah's own cars, and go get fries at Burger King, and come right back. That's it. It's framed as an unimaginable act of rebellion. million. Just as many of Mariah's biggest early hits are now framed as super cheery and carefree

glimpses into an alternate universe the real Mariah Carey could only dream of inhabiting. She writes, I created the fun and free girl in my videos so that I could watch a version of myself be alive, live vicariously through her, the girl I pretended to be. The girl I wished was me. Mariah Carey's fourth album is called Merry Christmas. Here's someone who truly understands Darling Loves Pain. Merry Christmas came out in 1994, the year after Mariah and Tommy got married. There are 10 songs on the original album. Respectfully, I don't have much to say about nine of them.

They're lovely. They're fabulous. One broader note, Mariah writes a lot about how Tommy was also visibly uncomfortable with her biracial identity and had Sony Framer as essentially a white artist and an adult contemporary artist. Whereas Mariah was naturally and shrewdly drawn to more contemporary R&B and even hip-hop. In 1995, she'd collaborate with the Wutan clan's Old Dirty Bastard on the hugely successful fantasy remix, and this, too, is portrayed as an unimaginable act of rebellion.

Tommy didn't get the appeal at all. ODB was boisterous and calamitous, and by no means an old guard label boss's idea of a modern pop star, Mariah saw what was coming. Her husband did not. Another profoundly sad image in the book, when a workweek ended, Mariah and Tommy would ride in their limo out of New York City

and upstate toward Bedford, toward Sing Sing, and Mariah would love to listen to Hot 97, the beloved New York City rap station, until they got too far away and the signal faded out, after which Tommy would often put on

a Frank Sinatra CD. There's your artistic tension. There's the other prison, the musical prison she had to break out of. Keep that tension in mind when you listen to Merry Christmas, how much more vibrant and manifestly her it gets when she tilts toward R&B, towards soul, toward gospel. It's not going to break any streaming records,

but Jesus, oh, what a wonderful child, is a strong closer. Or you can just listen to all I want for Christmas is you another 200,000 times. The song comes up almost immediately in the meaning of Mariah Carey. As a child, apparently, Mariah's awkward family Christmas dinners would inevitably devolve into torrents of verbal abuse. So she banged out most of the song on a cheap little Cassio keyboard, as she puts it, as a way of imagining the Winter Wonderland, her mother and her siblings could not provide. Quote, it was from my little girl's spirit in those early fantasies of family and friendship that I wrote,

all I want for Christmas is you. Think of how it begins. ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding the delicate chimes are reminiscent of those little wooden toy pianos like the one schroeder had on peanuts end quote it always comes back to charlie brown but then immediately the song turns into an all caps and italicized extravaganza like thirty five percent of the appeal of this song is the backing vocals right there and uh i i have a one and a half octave range i'm sorry Sorry, I'll never do that again. Mariah co-wrote and co-produced this song with the music biz heavyweight Walter Afanasiaf. They'd collaborated on a bunch of her biggest hits like Hero and One Sweet Day. Walter describes their collaborative style as musical ping pong. He's almost sheepish now in interviews when he says that every element of all I want for Christmas is you,

other than the vocals, is him sitting at a computer. Those vocals, of course, are all the unbridled, overpowering, holly-jolly humanity. you can handle. That's my favorite vocal run in the whole song, even if most of Santa, won't you bring me the one I really need is one note. It's like a tinsel machine gun. And yet, who is from Mariah Carey's perspective, the one I really need? Not Tommy Motola, who cameos in the official video as Santa Claus. That Santa ain't real, kids. Mariah and Tommy divorced in 1998. She made it out of Sing Sing. Hot 97 came back into range on her limo radio. She would struggle personally and professionally in the years to come with glitter,

with a subsequent marriage to and divorce from Nick Cannon, but she'd have more all-universe triumphs too and more on her own musical terms, more number one hits like We Belonged together, and the family she always wanted, via her children with Nick Cannon, twins, her daughter Moroccan and her son Monroe, Rock and Row. Mariah makes her late father's famous Linguinean white clam sauce every Christmas Eve. Oh, and also, now that the Billboard charts are reactive to what people are listening to via streaming services from moment to moment, all I want for Christmas is you finally hit number one in December 2019.

And may very well be the number one song in America in December every year for the rest of recorded time. Time is passing through this song in a most peculiar way. It's the first Christmas song to hit number one since the Chipmunk song in 1958. Alvin! And it's Mariah Carey's 19th, number one. one song overall. One more and she catches the Beatles. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. A happy ending then. But don't ever forget that this happy ending took 25 years. It will make the song sound better. I promise. Put it this way. Christmas songs broadly fall into two categories.

They are either describing holiday revelry that is currently happening or they are actively yearning for holiday revelry that might not happen at all. The miracle of all I want for Christmas is you is that it yearned so vividly and exuberantly that it felt real and in fact eventually became real. I don't want to belabor this, but I'm speaking to you in late 2020, and thus the end of, for many of us, a cartoonishly hard year. And the holidays might be even harder with COVID-19, with the distinct possibility that the kindest, or least safest thing you can do for your loved ones this year is to stay away from them. A sentiment like, all I want for Christmas is you. As simple as that always appeared, it hits a little differently this year, maybe.

The gap between fantasy and reality might hurt you as much as it initially hurt her. Do what you have to do. And if you're struggling to do what you have to do, my sincere advice to you is sing harder. We turn now, as we often do, to Isaac Lee, our intrepid producer, professional musician, studio guy, who can speak more to the technical, to the music notational. side of things. So, Isaac, welcome. Hey, it's good to be here. It's good to have you here as always. Isaac, here's a very technical question for you. What makes all I want for Christmas so Christmassy? Very, very technical question. Well, I mean, there are quite a few elements that you can hear very obviously that achieve this. The literal jingle bells you hear throughout the entire song. That really gives it away, right? That it's a Christmas song. Plus, there are some du-op elements. the background vocals, the 12-8 time signature. The entire arrangement is really like walking into college as a freshman

and taking a class called Introduction to Christmas 101. It's really very, very Christmassy in every explicit sense of the holiday. But then, of course, there's the music theory element of it. Well, right, because I was trying to imagine if you could somehow remove the Christmas element from this song entirely, but leave the song. Like, if you changed the lyrics, if you took out the sleigh bells, if you released it in July, if you called it all I want, tonight is you or something like does that work at all or is there an essential christmasness

to this song that can't be denied or removed yeah i think there is an essential christmasness to the song like the 12 8 times in nature for example can't be ignored but i think most importantly as a music theory nerd the most outstanding one is the extensive use of something called the four minor chord or is the two diminished seven they're kind of used interchangeably but if you know your Dore Mies, you know that there are seven notes in a major key. And so the four minor chord is a chord built on top of

the fourth note, Fah, of Doremi Fah. And it's a chord that's usually used in jazz. It's effective at creating a dreamy or a lifted mood. I have a keyboard in front of me. Let me just play it for you. Hit me. So if I'm in the key of

G here, that's the key of G. And in this key, if I play the four minor, it's going to be the C minor. Coming back to the G, you can hear that this creates a very dreamy mood, right? And the very theoretical reason for this is that there are two notes in here that literally walk down chromatically, which means just one step.

So it goes from and also. And it's this wonderful mystic feeling. And it's used across genres. Again, it's used a lot in jazz. But it's a great alternative way to land or resolve at the end of a progression. Okay. Is this primarily then a Christmasy deal? No, not necessarily. You know, throughout music history, a lot of genres, a lot of bands, a lot of songs have used this. A really famous case is creep by Radiohead, which you would not associate at all with Christmas. Yes, that famous Christmas

song, yes. Yeah, but it's entirely built on a four chord progression that ends on the four minor. I'm going to play it for you, see if you can hear it. And of course, a little obscure band, maybe you've heard of them. They're a 60s band. They're called the Beatles. They use this all the time, like, in my life. But, of course, it is used a lot in Christmas songs. The reason being that a lot of the Christmas songs that we know and love today were written and recorded during a time when jazz and jazz-adjacent genres were the contemporary styles at the time.

Like, listen to. White Christmas by Bing Crosby. It also comes up in the Christmas song by Nat King Cole. Yul-tied carols being sung by choir. And honestly, the list goes on and on and on. Like, I'll be home for Christmas, wonderful Christmas time by Paul McCartney. basically half of Michael Boulblet's catalog they all have the four minor chord

at least in some way, shape, or form. And if we go back to All I Want for Christmas is You, our song of the day, Mariah Carey uses the four minor in the verse, which in the key of G is a C minor 7 over E flat. And that might sound technical, but it just means that it starts, the bass note is the E flat, and then it goes,

it's the same chord. It's the same thing here, just inverted a little bit. And you can listen to it kick in at the underneath the Christmas tree line. You see how dreamy it feels? Like the complexity of the emotion. It's lifted and then the cathartic landing when it resolves. Right, right.

Because, like, this song has always definitely been super cathartic for people, which I think most people without music theory training would just put down to the intensity of the vocal of Mariah's singing. So is she basically smuggling in musical, like notational catharsis as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the intensity of Moriah singing can't be understated. It's definitely, it doesn't work without her vocals, her iconic vocals. But yes, the way that the chords move is also achieving this landing.

Right. And then in the chorus, she uses this twice. So when she sings, no, in more than you could ever know, it's coming down, but it still feels lifted. And then I think this is the most recognizable way to. to use this chord. She uses it as the final chord in the entire cycle where you would actually expect

a different chord. In Western music, you usually want to finish a core progression from the five to the one. There's like mathematical and psychoacoustical reasons. I don't understand it.

But it's just how it is. You want to go from the five to the one. If I just play it really quickly here, it's in the key of G again. You would want to go from the five to the one. So that's the five chord. But what Moriah does instead is use the four minor.

Although at the same time, she doesn't actually completely ditch the five. It's actually a four minor over five, which means the bass note is actually playing the five while the four minor chord plays above it. So that might sound pretty abstract. Let me just play it for you again. From the two, four minor over five to the one. So you can really hear how it creates this landing. but it's not straightforward.

It's actually, it's a little bit more complex than that. And how about instead of me playing it, I'll let her sing it. Listen closely when she sings Christmas. So you hear how that lands. You hear, she basically has the best of both worlds here. She still has the traditional 5 to one landing,

landing on that baseline. But the harmonies tell a much more complex story, a much more wistful kind of mood. Yeah, yeah. When you hear this chord, this strategy in non-Christmas songs like creep like do they sound christmasy to you at all no because they don't use it the same way right the chords around the four minor do not create the same mood i mean this is a beautiful thing about harmony this is a beautiful thing about music theory in terms of a

as an artistic tool that you can grab from anyone can grab this tool of the four minor chord but when you incorporate it into a christmas song it means that much more and it takes on kind of a historical context as you tear through the canon of Christmas music, it's all the elements around it that's going to define it to be Christmasy. And the sleigh bells. And the sleigh bells, of course. Can't forget about the sleighbills. My guest today is Kyla Marshall, a longtime Mariah Carey fan, who has written for The Guardian, Kenfolk, The Believer, O Magazine, and The Ringer, among others. Kyla, thanks so much for being with us here today. Thanks for having me. Of course. So you wrote about Mariah and her memoir for The Ringer.

And that book dramatically changed the way that I hear early Mariah Carey albums, like all these carefree pop hits that now read to me as like these terribly sad cries for help, like their actual fantasies. Like, do you hear her differently now? Is there any going back? I don't think so because I think that there are a lot of songs that are very clearly about her pain in her anguish and a lot of songs that I certainly interpreted about her feeling kind of out of place for being biracial.

But a lot of the songs are not really about particular experiences. And she talks about that a little bit in her book where she wrote these songs as like a child, you know, she's talking about being alone in love and having a vision of love and she'd never had a boyfriend, you know. So some of the songs where she's talking about her family, though, you know, just hearing how abusive, her siblings were to her and how neglected she was as a child. It's like, oh, this is kind of like speaking on that a little bit. Yeah. When did you first become a Mariah Carey fan? Like, what was the first song to really hit you? That's a good question. I think it might have been,

I'll be there from MTV Unplugged, but definitely by like the daydream butterfly era, I was like solidly on team Mariah. Yeah. How old? were you at that point? I was like 10 or 11, so I was in elementary school and someone like her who was like a girl, a black girl, a pop singer, she was pretty, she had nice clothes. I think that's just kind of like she was like the big sister that I didn't have. That must have been how I was imagining her and why I had like a collage of her images on my wall that I made myself.

Yeah. She writes a lot about Sony and Tommy, like, marketing her for a long time as like adult contemporary as this very serious and elegant and adult artist, you know, and really she was in her early 20s and she loved R&B and pop. Like, did she strike you at first as grown up or at least singing more to adults than to kids, or did she always seem a little childlike to you? Well, she seemed adult to me because she was so much older than me. So it was like I had no perspective on the fact. that she was a very young woman who didn't have a lot of access or power or control. And now for me, being an adult woman, it's just, it's terrifying to think of a 23-year-old being married to an old man like that, you know. Right, right. All of the warning signs that I'm so grateful to have learned, like, just stay away from him,

you know? Right. But she, when she was going through that transition from, like, very, very buttoned up wearing a turtleneck under a sweater vest under a coat, like that whole era of Mariah, when she was transitioning into like tube top and miniskirt at the same time, which is a little much, Mariah, I remember watching that and reading about it and like understanding the context, even though I was, you know, I was a kid. I was like, that was a new story at the time of like Mariah Carey is transitioning into doing

more R&B and hip hop. She's got Puff Daddy and ODB and DeBrat. And like, The Lox and Peter Guns, you know, like she had all of these unmistakably hip hop and black artists who she was working with. And so I think I started to understand of like, oh, so when she was very, very clothed and she was singing all those like very stuffy pop songs that are like very well composed, but I was like, oh, that wasn't really her. She was married to that guy, that old guy, And he made her do all that. And I could see that that huge metaphor of the butterfly emerging from the cocoon. I was like, oh, I get she's free now.

Right, right. How underrated is Mariah as a songwriter? Like, does she get anywhere near the credit she deserves for the way her songs are constructed? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I just was having this conversation with someone earlier today where she was like, oh, Mariah Carey can live off of that. All I want for Christmas is you,

forever. I was like, it's not just that one song. That's just one of many, many, many songs. Yeah. That she will live off of forever and her children and her children's children. I really do think that it's because she's a woman and she's a black woman. I don't think that that discrediting of her intellectual and artistic ability would be the same if she were like a grungy white guy playing guitar. Right. Neil Young or whoever, right. Or, you know, Kurt Cobain or someone who just is like, well, he's an artist.

He's a tortured artist. He has thoughts. He turns them into feelings and ideas. He can play an instrument, lip-dity blip. You know, it's like anyone who is being evaluated visually and who's singing. Singing is just not really valued in the same way as playing an instrument. And so often that divide on a gender basis is like men play instruments, meaning they learned how to do it. allegedly. And like, singing is just a thing that happens. A natural talent, you know, that you

didn't have to develop at all. Yeah. Right. And that it can't be shaped or cultivated or that singers don't study other singers and model their voices after those singers. One thing I did learn from her memoir, though, was how much she studied songwriting. And I think that kind of is like, was the missing piece in helping me understand how could one person. and write so many hits, so many catchy, indelible songs. Because sometimes people do kind of happen upon something, and it's an accident with her. It was not an accident at all. She studied musical trends.

And it kind of reminds me of how Will Smith talked about studying what the biggest blockbusters were in film and then deciding to only do movies that had aliens or whatever it was. Like, that was a strategic thing that wasn't just someone offering him an opportunity. And the same is true with Mariah. Right. You know. What jumps out at you about all I want for Christmas is you in particular? Like, what about her construction of this song makes it so durable?

I think it's the, like, the doo-op feel, which it's like the feeling of nostalgia. It's simple without being simplistic. And it's just so fun and easy to sing along too. I mean, I think there's elements of it that maybe make it a little bit different. She's got kind of like the gospely backup singers, but it's got a real propulsive energy to it. And it's so catchy. It's so Christmas. Yeah.

The path this song is taken on the charts. Like it took 25 years to get to number one. Is that just down to streaming and the way charts are calculated now? Or is there some quality to this song that makes it grow more powerful with time? I mean, technically, I think it is just was like how Billboard was organized, but I'm not sure. I mean, her fans, I am a fan, but I'm not like a streaming warrior fan. I'm not like a Mariah Justice warrior. You don't have it on repeat right now as you're talking to me, just with a volume all the way down, just to boost her numbers.

Okay. I don't, but I do like that album a lot. I think it's good. Maybe it's just one of those songs that you do want to listen to every year. And then you're kind of like, well, wait a minute, shouldn't we, shouldn't we do this every year? There is something about that song and that album where they just sound so much more authentic and immediate than a lot of other albums, which I think a lot of people just record a Christmas album because they're supposed to. And maybe that just comes through. It's a safe choice.

You know, that's that's not where they're reaching artistically when they go to the Christmas album. Just we got to do something, you know, let's just pound out 10 Christmas carols and be done with it. But this is, this was more intentionality to this from the beginning, I think. Yeah, more intentionality. Maybe there's something. She said that she wrote it in like 20 minutes. Maybe there's something about like a throwaway quality of it where it's like it gives it that, that power of not trying too hard. Yeah.

I was struck like you were in the book and in the interview she's done recently talking about still struggling with self-worth for all the success she's had, for all the number one hits she's had. She's still struggling with this stuff. Like, this is someone with more number one hits than pretty much anyone in history. Do you think that this song hitting number one is extra validating in a way that it's come after so long and that there might be something to this song where like this can hopefully convince her of her worth a little more? No, not from what I've read. read. There was a great profile on her in New York magazine. And she did an interview with Oprah. And it seems like she's still working on it. You know, she's still working on. She said that she didn't think she deserved to be happy and successful at the same time. You know, like, that's like a,

that's a really intense thing you have to work on and has to come from within is believing in your own worthiness. But I am really glad that she seems to have like this genuine connection with her fans and that, um, that they are the ones who are constantly propelling these songs to number one, like making glitter go number one after that huge debacle. And so, um, maybe it's one of those things that'll happen slowly over time where she'll just realize like, hey, I'm, I'm worth it. I'm enough. I hope so. Because to not be able to, enjoy your success in your own life after all of that. It's like she should be able to. Yeah. Hopefully it won't take another 25 years. Yes, hopefully. Thank you so much,

Kyla. This has been great. Thanks, Ralph. Thanks so much to our guests today, Kylo Marshall, to our producers, Isaac Lee and Justin Sales. And thanks to you, of course, for listening. And now, without further ado, here is Mariah Carey with all I want for Christmas is you. Thank you.