One Song - Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You"

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

What makes a holiday song so timeless that it can top the charts decades after it’s released? On this episode, Diallo, LUXXURY, and One Song Executive Producer Lesley Gwam break down Mariah Carey’s 1994 hit “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” They dig into how Mariah co-wrote the track with longtime collaborator Walter Afanasieff, and the sonic choices that turned it into an unforgettable Christmas classic. Get your ears ready for Mariah’s marvelous, isolated vocals! Don’t let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use code ONESONG at Monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. One Song Spotify Playlist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy holidays, One Song Nation. Today we're bringing back an episode about the modern Christmas classic. You've probably heard it everywhere this season. That's right. We're talking about Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You. It's one of the best-selling singles of all time. It's the number one selling single of all time, if you can believe it. That's right, Tialo.

In this episode, we're going to unwrap the sonic magic that made this song an instant addition to the holiday music canon. That's right. And get ready because you're going to hear Mariah's marvel. marvelous, isolated vocals in all the glory. Consider it our gift under your podcast tree. Luxury today's song is one of the greatest and best-selling holiday songs of all time. Of all time.

When it was released in 1994, it went all the way to number six in the U.S. On the Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary chart. But listen, that's okay because it went all the way to number two in the UK in Japan. All right, listen, music streaming has made this song incredibly popular, to the point. where it finally reached number one on the billboard chart 25 years after its release, as well as going number one in 30 other countries. Now it's certified diamond. That's right, Diallo.

This holiday jam continues to top the charts during a very festive time of the year, whether you're out shopping or grabbing a coffee or attending a dinner party. Or just living. If you're breathing and your ears are on, there's a pretty good chance you'll hear this pop and fashion icon tell you that there's only one thing that she needs. It's one song, and that song is a little underground ditty you might have heard before. Super niche. All I want for Christmas is you by Mariah Carey.

Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IDPrivatewealth.com. I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes

DJ, DJ, songwriter and musicologist Luxury, aka the guy who whispers, interpolation. And if you want to watch one song, please go to our YouTube channel and watch this full episode. And while you're at it, please like and subscribe. All right, let's get it going. We've got a very special guest for this episode. For a song that's become a Christmas standard from one of the best-selling artists of all time, we knew what we needed a guest. And we went searching high and low, high and low, to find a Mariah Carey Superfan. That's right, a certified lamb.

And we found her right outside the heartbeat studio door. Please give it up for one of the executive producers of one song, our good, good buddy, Leslie, Gwam. Leslie, thank you for coming on the song. Thanks for coming on the show. No problem. Out of the control room, into the guest seat. Yeah, up here.

Through the wall. Okay, so before we dive into breaking down, all I want for Christmas is you, we need to ask you, Leslie. What does this song, and Mariah Carey, what do they mean to you? Okay. So I have come from a very big Christmas family. My parents love the holidays, decorations every year, big family gatherings. Where'd you grow up?

Outside Chicago. There you go. Midwestern. Yeah, so we always have lots of family around. This album plays every year without fail. Top to bottom, not just the song, the entire. The entire album, talk to bottom. Already in a different class of people who love this song.

Because some people just think it's a single, it's a full album. Right, exactly. So there's that. And then Mariah Carey. What she means to me, everything. That is my queen. Okay. So let me just ask you, what does it mean to be a Mariah Carey super fan?

And by the way, what do you call y'all selves? We are the lambs. Why? Which I always assumed because Mariah had a little lamb. Like, it sounds very close to Mary had a little lamb, But you told me that is not the case. It's actually not true. What I learned, it came from an inside joke between Mariah and Trailerens,

who's her background singer forever. Love Trailerens. Yes. So apparently there was an artist who shower me name was truly she did not name this artist either. Who calls like his employees lovingly, he calls them lambs. Be a lamb and do this for me. And so. It sounds almost like a little bit of a put down.

Right. Putting you in your place. But like Mariah and Trey and thought it was funny and adapted as an inside joke. And then she brought it to her fans. And then the fans, you know what we're gonna become lambs and so we are the lamb-belly the lamb-belly but there is a real there's a there's a cuteness to all things Mariah so it really fits in it fits right why is why is my aunt and this cute why is there cuteness in my mind

she likes to say that she's eternally 12 oh okay I'm picking up on that exactly so that's where you're getting it that's interesting coming from an artist's point of view because I know that a lot of times when I'm working on a script I always try and tap into I always say 14 year old me like the one who just liked movies and wasn't like literally trying to pick apart every single thing just because you can find your joy there. I wonder if that's so that she's like I just want to find 12 year old Mariah. Exactly. And you read her memoir. She had a rough childhood and some pretty traumatic things happened to her. Yeah. After that. So she said 12 was like the last age where she was really able to be a child. How did you

come to be a part of the Lambly? Like what what led to that? Sure. So I'm in my mid 30s. So Mariah's been a star for almost as long ago here. Yeah, pretty much. My parents had the original of her first album, Mariah Carey. So I've always loved that album. When I was a little kid, I really loved emotions. Emotions was so good. That whole album, not just the main track. You also have, and you don't remember, you have can't let go,

you have Make It Happen. Oh, make it happen. By the way, make it happen. Can't Let Go. These are like radio songs in Atlanta when I'm, you know, I'm still a teenager, but like I'm hearing these songs. I'll never forget when emotions came out. We were like, oh, this is cool.

Like nowadays I look back. I'm like, that song, was clearly probably written in part for like a Whitney Houston, but then it was given, you know, to Mariah Carey. Don't do that. You know Mariah Carey writes all her songs. Don't even do that with me, Diyah. So apparently she's a songwriter.

We will get to that. No, we're going to get to that. But, yeah, motions was, as a kid, I loved that album. But the album that made you realize, oh, this is the artist of my life was a butterfly album. Oh, wow. Every song on there is incredible. She was going through, this is post-divorce from Tommy. So we really got to know who Mariah was.

person because she hinted at the hip-hop R&B styling, how much she enjoyed that. But we didn't realize how fully a mess she was in that until that album. I mean, she was working mob deep on that album. And bone thugs. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's butterfly. Yeah.

That's butterfly. 1998. Because there's an album in between the moment of emotions. Daydream. Fantasy was on Daydream underneath the scars and amazing. That was the one where I felt like, because by this point, like, I'm a freshman in college, I think. And like, that was when I realized, oh, Mariah wants to let people know that, hey, I'm,

I'm part black here. Yep. Exactly. But we're really jumping ahead because we're going to. to get into all that. Sorry, I can do this all day. No, we should. We should.

But listen, in order to understand the significance of this song, we gotta take a step back and talk about where Mariah was in her career. To be clear, we're talking about 1994. Mariah was already very, very successful. She was 24. She had already won two Grammys,

which is more than the Grammys I had won in 24. And she had released three albums, her self-titled debut album in 1990, Emotions in 1991, and MusicBots in 1993. Also, Mariah already had eight number one singles, including Vision of Love, which, Man, I mean, if you could get a slow dance to vision of love, you were in there. Vision and Love, emotions, hero.

Might talk about hero in a little bit. And Merry Christmas is her fourth album. Leslie, what else is going on in Mariah's life and career? So at this point, she is married to Tommy Motta. Uh-huh. Head of Sony Columbia Records at that time. Is this the last album she's going to release under Tommy? No.

Okay. He comes up the idea of doing a Christmas album, which is really interesting. We'll get into that later. I want to jump ahead. But yeah, she's this global superstar, but she's just realizing it. Again, I'm going to refer to her memoir a lot here. Reddit, I listen to it, of course.

She mentions that she didn't realize how popular she was because she was requested away in upstate New York. She would come into the city to do shows and then go back up to her mansion with Tommy. So she realized she's a global superstar around the music box time when she gets a peep of the crowd

waiting for her as she walked into the van. This is really pre-internet. It would be very easy to be convinced. Oh, you know, I'm like, I'm pretty big in the tri-state area, maybe. You know, like, didn't know that, like, Lil Diallo was in Atlanta listening to her. She's finally realizing her power at this moment.

He's just a Christmas album. And, you know, as a songwriter, she's up to the task. The other thing that's interesting about Tommy is I feel like he tried to keep her from being too black. You know, I mean, like, folks, you know, around this time, you know, earlyish mid-90s, if you will, folks have been questioning Mariah's blackness. I feel like she never downplayed it. And on this album, especially on all you know, all I want for Christmas is you, you can hear Mariah working in some soul and gospel elements, especially in the backing vocals, which we'll get into it a little bit. Leslie, how else was Mariah trying to speak up and embrace her black heritage?

Mariah's been very open about her heritage, but it's just that, again. For those who don't know, do you know what her heritage is at all? Is it that like her dad was half black or something like that? No, her dad was black. Yeah, from New York. Had Venezuela roots, but he grew up in New York. Oh, sure. Yeah, so she, yeah, she's always been very open about that.

Yeah. But she also mentioned a lot. Tommy tried to wash it off of her. Of course. She was a young person doing adult contemporary, which sounds great. But, you know, she's a 20-something-year-old from New York. She's into new Jack Swain movement's coming. She's into hip-hop.

But she wasn't able to express that early in the early days. Right. Because Tom and thought that was going to suppress her ability to be accepted by the mainstream. Yeah. And it's all he knew. Yeah. He knew adult contemporary in jazz. So that's where he pushed her.

Exactly. He wanted her in areas of music where he had some control and sort of like a knowledge base. Right. And even and she even says in her book that she, he would never let her wear her hair straight because it looked like it was curly hair that had been straightened. And he said with her hair being curly, it made her look more Italian. Wow. And she was like, ironically, my hair is curly because I'm black. Honestly, the gospel bit is was huge. I mean, even before this album, though, like in the dream lover video.

Yes. She had hip hop dancers all throughout it. you know, but she's always up until... Tommy was like, hey, do we got to hire these guys? That's your time. Okay, that's a great impression. That's my Tommy. He used to that for the rest of the episode.

But yeah, she had dancers. Even someday, she did a new Jack Swing version of that song. That is incredible. That's a version I sort of know. Right. Yeah, exactly. And then... Ryan, this era always has, this era always has like two versions.

Like, sometimes I'll even hear like the original version of fantasy. I'm like, what's the cool? of the remix. I need to realize that. Yeah. But anyway, because she has those versions. She also has the dance version of songs as well. Yeah. But we'll get back to the album. Yeah. So she's also the gospel cry, as I mentioned. And Mariah, if you know one thing about her, she does not play about her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. She's very religious. Yes. But those gospel vocals is very clear that the influence comes from and she knows how to sing with a choir. A lot of pop stars who sing with choirs, they're not really enmeshed.

It's like, here's the pop star and there's the choir. But you can tell that Mariah was doing some choir directing, spent time with these vocalists as well. Now Leslie, her mom, Patricia was a vocal, it was a singer too. She was an opera singer, not a church singer, not a gospel singer. Or what she both? She's an opera singer. So let's talk a little bit about Christmas albums in journal. Usually artists are making them later in the career, like, you know, when their career is

on the decline or just like even if it's not on the decline, like they're not like the hat new thing that's out there. At least that was in the 90s. Like in 1994, the folks releasing Christmas albums were Diana Ross. Donna Summer, Kenny G. Favorite of the show, Kenny G. And Neil Diamond,

and at the time, the Christmas album industry wasn't nearly as big as it is today. So what does it mean for Mariah, Carrie, to make a Christmas album in the 90s in her mid-20s as her star power is only rising?

Yeah, I mean, it's really incredible, right? Because she could have just phoned it in. She could have done an album full of covers, called a day. There's my obligation because Tommy wanted her to do a Christmas album

and your husband and label boss says you do a little bit of a little bit an album, you do the album. Right. And how old is she at this time? Yeah, she's in her 20s, also that age girl's a little nuts. Oh, my crazy. Um, and Power Dynamic. Right, right. You know, she takes upon herself to write three original Christmas songs because she loved the holidays. She's mentioned many of times that. And she is a songwriter. Yeah, exactly. Don't clip this bird's wings. Like, let her fly. Let her fly. She wrote that song, the song of the episode, as well as Miss You Most of Christmas Time and Jesus born on this day.

Yeah, to me, Christmas albums are a little bit like, you know, Vegas residency. Like, first off, you kind of have to earn it. Like, we have to, like, have, like, let's say four albums by you before you go releasing a Christmas album. But, like, it's also like, but, you know, a little bit, Christmas albums and Vegas residencies have changed. If you go to Vegas now, you can see a lot of, like, the latest hip-hop performers at Drays. You know what I mean? Like that. You don't have to wait until you're in your second actor or your career.

Right. Right. I mean, it's how Christmas albums were, too, right? Christmas albums were something that you did when you read a decline. Yeah. Now everyone does them pretty early in your career, too. Could be the second album. Truly.

I mean, I, when I was interning in the legal department at a record label, they had stipulations that artists had to have a Christmas album as part of their contract. Like, not even like a Christmas song, a Christmas album at some point. And my guess is that something to do with Ms. Mariah Carey. It's funny that you found that in the contracts, you know, because I'm very curious to know, like, are the splits of these songs sometimes different than just a regular album that you record for the label? But I'm sure the luxury has the answer to that as well as sort of a makeshift history on how Christmas.

How dare you? I'm sorry. It's very well-constructed history over here. This is the working clock. Not a shanty town of histories over here. I didn't mean to insult you this close to the holidays. But my friend, can you walk us through sort of like the eras of making songs about Christmas? Yeah, no, it's just interesting talking about this phenomenon of Christmas songs because it is a historical entity.

and over time what, you know, in this era, we're borrowing from previous eras, and it builds, it builds, it builds. So the idea of that being associated with a new artist, it's like, yeah, it makes sense for a Neil Diamond, who's an older artist who has lots of chapters in their career to kind of dig into this other history-driven chapter. It's about nostalgia. It's about this annual family-driven, memory-driven feeling that's like a vibe, the Christmas vibe. A new artist who maybe, I mean, clearly at this point, she has established herself as an artist, but she isn't at that point. of being put out to pasture, as it were. She's not a legacy artist.

She's not a legacy artist, so it is an interesting choice. On this show, we obviously talk a lot about song origins and musical borrowing. And a lot of times it's the sampling, it's the interpolation. There's a third type of borrowing that we allude to every now and then, where nothing directly is lifted, no melodies, no samples, but it's a very strong evocation. You know in the first few notes exactly what this is meant to be conjuring in terms of your associations with other songs and other music. So with Christmas songs, we have at least three eras of Christmas songs and their corresponding

genre tropes. And let me just quickly explain what a genre trope is. When you're playing a rock and roll song, if you're a rock and roll band, it kind of requires you, for example, to have guitars. So genre tropes can be the thing in that genre that is expected. And it can be instrumentation. It can be chord changes. It can be the manner of singing.

It can be the lyrical content. It's a little bit the type of thing that you know it when you're not. you hear it. But we hear all kinds of genre tropes going on in Christmas songs. So we're going to break down a little bit in this episode what some of them are, where they come from, and how Mariah uses them in her song. So I imagine, especially with nostalgia being at the heart of it, era one is that Tin Pan Alley dusting off the old Cole Porter song playbook. Exactly. The Great American Songbook. So this is that batch of songs that come out of the sort of 20s through the 50s. It's Broadway. It's musicals. It's Tin Pan Alley. These are songs written by Gertie.

and Cole Porter and Rogers and Hammerstein, our most recent episode on Ariana Grande, we talk about them. These are songs that are also the basis of a lot of jazz music. So we have, what's important about that is there's harmonies that are brought into bear that are unusual in rock music and in current pop music. But we're kind of used to these unusual harmonies, but when we hear them, they absolutely evoke this era, this type of music, and specifically in certain situations that I'll be naming in a moment, they really make you think Christmas. Or they really make you think Christmas song. I think for me, the main one from that first era is obviously,

I think it might be the most successful Christmas song of at least the first half of the 20th century, which is white Christmas by being Crosby. That's the one. Of a white Christmas. Which, by way, my parents thought was really racist for the long time. Oh, let me change. Let's talk about that. They were like, wait, wait.

I don't get that Christmas? I love the thing. I love that you took it. that way I'll never forget when I was a kid the the glu-clux Klan had a had a march through Cummings Georgia which is just outside of Atlanta and I remember that their float said I'm dreaming of a white Christmas so you know not saying that Bing was the most it was like some progressive lion wow but it was interesting to see that song a particular co-opted by people who interpreted it the way that you did as a child it's a beautiful song that has another to do with

white nationalism to be clear and it's it's one of the few great songs that has something to do with white nationalism. Am I correct? All right. Absolutely true. So that song has some jazz chord changes as do have yourself a merry little Christmas. Chestnuts roasting up on an open fire, which the song is actually called the Christmas song. Yes. And then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. These are all songs from the 40s. Yeah. This one of the original batches of eras, I would say, of holiday eras. It really comes into the foreground in this era of the Great American Songbook and these jazz pop, Broadway, show kinds of songs that are being written.

They're very popular. This is what pop music really is in that era. Some of these songs are so depressing, can I just say. Some of them are so slow. I'll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams. That's all brings you down. What a downer of a song. I thought we were celebrating.

That's true. Actually, there's another era a little earlier that I want to take us to. Even before this great American songbook era, the 20s through the 50s, we have in the late 1890s in St. Petersburg, the Nutcracker. So this is Tchaikovsky. It's a Russian ballet, and it's based on an 1816 fairy tale called the Nutcracker and the Mouse King. This is relevant for two reasons. One, it's repopularized because Disney's Fantasia uses the music in 1940.

So it's back in the mainstream. It was a popular play, or musical, I should say, but it's resurgence annually as like a thing you take your kids to or your kids are in is really kind of more of a product of this era. Well, getting back to genre for a second, one of the reasons I bring this up is because one of the components of genre, which is like how a feeling is evoked of other songs that came before is the use of instrumentation. And from this 1892 Chikovsky ballet, we get an instrument that gets put into the public consciousness that was brand new at the time. And that's called the cheleste, or sometimes pronounced celesta. It means heavenly in French. And you've heard it. And it sounds like this. So that's from Dance of the Sugar Plum Ferry. Also from the Eminem's commercial that comes out every Christmas.

Santa. He exists. It is perhaps the most evocative sound for Christmasiness. Sure. Is the sound of this sort of child's toy music box, high-pitched bell. It was a brand new instrument. Tchaikovsky heard it when he was traveling to Paris. And he's like, oh my God, I'm going to use this in my next piece.

Because no one's heard it before. It's going to bring the house down. And it did. No one had heard these sounds before. He asked his publisher to get one, but to keep it a total secret. He wrote to him, have it sent direct. wrecked to St. Petersburg. No one there must know about it. I'm afraid Rimsky Korsakov might hear of it and make it's going to leak. It's going to leak before I can. I expect the instrument will make a

tremendous sensation. Music has never changed. Music is all about like, oh yo, I got a secret. I have to write these songs because if I don't write them, then Prince will steal them. Like, it's just like it's the same thing. Hundreds of years earlier. So they're sensitive about their shit. It's true. You've answered something that I've wondered for so long. I was like, why does Harry Potter music remind me of Christmas. It is because of the dance. Headwick's theme from Harry Potter. It's Won't You Be My Neighbor from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood?

It's a song that evokes childhood. It evokes magic. It evokes Christmassyness. And Christmas, because I love watching the Harry Potter films with my kids at Christmas time, in particular because there's something Christmassy about that. I don't know. But I think it's because it sounds like it sounds like the sugar flunk there. There's not a single reason.

I think part of what I'm trying to build here is that there's something. there's a number of things that convey Christmasiness. And what Mariah and her co-writer, who will be talking about a little bit, and what they made use of when they sat down to write a Christmas album, the first step is, what makes it Christmassy? And one of the things is it's instrumentation. There's also some other things like rhythm

and the jazz harmonies I mentioned. But absolutely, the song begins with that sound that we just heard or a variation on it. Yeah. And then we have another era that I feel like a lot of my favorite Christmas songs fall into. And this era, let's call this the third era, tell us about it.

It's got a heavy rock influence. Absolutely. And this is my favorite Christmas album, too. We'll be talking about it on this episode because it sounds like it was Tommy Mottola's favorite Christmas album. And maybe Mariahs as well. But that's the early rock era of the late 50s, early 60s. And this is where we start getting the rock and roll

Christmas tropes like jingle bell rock and stuff like that, start to come in this moment where there is a new musical form. It's rock and roll. And then in the early 60s, we have the girl group, version of that and we have the Phil Specter era. So we're going to talk about Phil in a second, but first, one of the things in the early rock era that gets added, jingle bell rock, etc, is that rock and roll isn't straight. Don do do da da, don't do yet. It's still swingy. Yeah. It's still got that jazz. Da da da da da da da da da da. Rocking around Christmas tree. All of these songs are

rocking around with their swing songs. They're basically jazz. Dun, that's true. Jingle bell rock. Yeah. So that's this and that finds its way into our song today. We get that three over four feel. We'll be talking about that when we look into the stems in a little bit. Yeah. And it relates to the shuffle that we talked about a few episodes ago, the Blondie shuffle. You know, that everybody wants to rule the world. James Brown and Fred Wesley doing it to death. The 12-8 feel, the shuffle feel is also in this song.

Great Escape by Gwen Stefani. These are all the shuffle. So let's talk about the Phil Spector of it all because as we were talking, I was realized it sort of hit me. Like maybe Tommy Motola is a Phil Specter fan because Phil Specter and Ronnie had a very similar kind of dynamic, which was a very power-based, you know, the producer and the songwriter, and frankly, you know, not a very healthy one in terms of the relationship dynamic. So on November 22nd, 1963, it's the same day JFK is assassinated.

One of the greatest Christmas records of all time, certainly my favorite, a Christmas gift for you from Phil Spector is released. It's got Darlene Love, the Ronnets, the crystals. It is the famous wall of sound. It's some original and some of the classics reinterpreted. And Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys said it's his favorite album of all time. And apparently he wanted to play piano on one of the songs. So this is the Crystal's version of Santa Claus is coming to town.

Again, maybe my favorite Christmas song and recording of all time. So already, if you've been paying attention on this episode, you can make a checklist of the genre tropes right there, right? How did that album perform, like chart-wise? And I'm asking because it came out on a day of national tragedy, much like Mariah Carey's Glitter. I think you're right. I think it had a second life a little bit later. Much like litter. Yeah, and grows in popularity over the decades.

It's now generally considered to be in the canon. But you're right, at the time, it wasn't as huge. I'm going to make a case that there's actually a fourth era of Christmas songs. Not showing my age bias here, but I think that the 80s gave us an incredible amount of Christmas songs by people who were absolutely not in their Vegas residency era. So you had Christmas and Hollis by Rundee MC, which is one of my. personal favorites. Maybe the best.

We got to listen to that one now. Let's hear it. There's your jingle bells, another genre trope. But I love how to introduce a new genre trope with a cut. That's what I'm saying. I would argue that this is part of the fourth. There are other Christmas songs from the 80s that I think are absolute mainstays

are Christmas rapping by the waitresses. I feel like that's one of my favorite last Christmas. Which I know the device of. Some people love it. Some people hate it. I'm one of the people who love it. It's Wham. I feel like the 80s was like, hey, you don't have to be entering that Vegas residency part of life to come out with a solid Christmas song.

And there are many, many more that we're not even talking about. Yeah, like this Christmas. This Christmas. Hold on. Talk about a classic. Lift every voice and sing is the black national anthem. I would argue that this Christmas is the black national Christmas anthem. I'm going to have to agree with that.

Shake a hand. Shake a hand. And so there are a lot of New Wave, hip-hop, pop Christmas songs by younger artists. And I believe that that fourth era might help open the door for a Mariah. For Alcass and TLC, who we talked about a couple of episodes ago, their Christmas album produced both Slay Ride and the first Outcast single Players Ball. Like there is a let us know. Right. Let it snow.

So. Players ball was supposed to be a Christmas I always forget that. That's why it starts off beginning to look a lot like Not Christmas It's beginning to look a lot like what I'll see

You got a black man Haven't it You know what I'm saying So You got the jingle bells in there too John Rudd tropes John Rudd tropes To hear

Organized Noise Who produced both of those songs Slay Ride by TLC and Alcassus Player Ball To hear them talk about it They had like an afternoon To pull both of these songs together

And both of them are like solid, solid songs. So all of these eras, what they have in common as we get into the Mariah version of a Christmas classic, is she's pulling from all of these eras in different ways. A lot of it is, as they're writing the song, I'm sure very subconscious. Some of it is conscious, as we'll discuss. And what it all does in toto is it creates this layers of nostalgia and evocation. It's about memories we've got borrowed from another era with the Tin Pan Alley and the jazz

and the jazz swing in the rock. And by the way, it is worth pointing out that in the Phil Spectre in that third era, he was using a lot of those things, too. They were already nostalgic. So we've got layers and layers of nostalgia. So all of these things are put into play, like, masterfully for this song. And, of course, Mariah's voice skyrocketing the entire package into the stratosphere for 30 years of massive streams and listening and appreciation.

So the package of evocation is almost perfectly created. So it's not just the video, it's also her live shows, right? Yeah, like, if you go to her, like, live Christmas shows, she is always wearing, like, a cute little nutcracker outfit. There are candy canes everywhere. All her dances are decked out in Christmas. Are they doing the Busby Berkeley, like, dance routines, like in the video? Yeah, like, that's a book in the 30s version.

A lot of 30s jazz stuff is in the mix and all this stuff. Every Christmas image you can think of is in Mariah Carey. Because she couldn't just do it coming out wearing, like, a black, you know, wearing jeans and a t-shirt. It wouldn't work. When she sings, I think it's Jesus born on this day, Maybe she comes out in this white dress and she looks like the angel on top of the tree. It's so pretty.

I just got chills. Right? You know, I have to remember right. It's time. It's time. Yeah, it's always time over here. Let's get into how Mariah made this song. First things first, we must say that Mariah is, let's all say together, a songwriter.

That's right. Here's a clip of her stating that fact many times in her career. I thought of myself as, you know, a singer, songwriter. as a songwriter. As a songwriter, as a songwriter and a singer, which is, you know, I've co-written all the songs on my debut album. I do a regular studio album,

and I'm writing and producing every song. I mean, I think that's only fair that she did that because a lot of people will think that she's just being handed songs. Yeah, I mean, part of that is sexism. Let's just be real about that. No, another part of it is, I feel like in this point of her career,

honestly, for most of her career, she was compared to Whitney Houston. Right. It was Mariah and Whitney for some reason there can only be one. for some reason. Well, how did Whitney take all that? You know, Whitney was from Jersey, and she knew her, you know, so she wasn't really a fan

of that, but I don't think one of them liked being pitted against them. Because, again, there's no need. We can have more than one. There's more than one, yeah, of course. But Whitney was very open about she did not write her songs, who wrote those songs for her. Right. And you can't sing those songs as written for her voice.

I think to a certain extent everybody soon, oh, that pop artist, there's no way that they're writing those songs. So I think that there was a little bit of that. I think it speaks to what. What makes Mariah special that she did have such a big hand to play in the writing of her songs. Yeah, I mean, all for number ones, except for I'll be there, she wrote. That's crazy. I mean, her whole album's written by Mariah.

I mean, she works other people, but she firsthand writes all of these songs. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, she's in the songwriters Hall of Fame. Did not get there. Not writing her own songs. Yeah, so like I said, that clip, I love that clip. Yeah, it makes it very clear. Like, do not forget. Yes, she has an incredible voice and she's an amazing performer, but she also is a songwriter.

We're going to get to that theme a lot in this episode too because what happens behind the scenes, we talk about in this show so often, the mystery of what happens behind the scenes and the who did what and how much is it worth, etc. You're trying to math an unmathable thing. So what we get to, when the money comes in, you got to math. When the money comes in, you got to forget it. This is the conundrum, the core conundrum of all things creative, but especially songwriting is like, how do you do that? And then on the other side of it, it's the perception stuff like we're talking about, the sense that like there are some people that feel like some singers, understandably feel like they're undercredited for the work that they've actually done. There is a back and forth

that ends up happening on this song through the years to this day where the credit is, you know, there are some questions about who feels unfairly treated and why did it come to pass that linger, unfortunately. And it's unfortunate because two people came together, we're about to talk about one of them, to make this incredible hit song. And it's a shame that soon thereafter they stopped working together for reasons of credit. Well, I'm so glad that we have you here because not only are you a guy who really breaks down, like who gets what, but you're also a songwriter yourself. And so we'll have that perspective, too.

To be clear, Mariah co-wrote the album, Merry Christmas and the song, All I Went for Christmas is You with Walter Afanofsef, her longtime collaborator. Leslie, give you tell us something about what inspired Mariah to make this song. Sure. I think I mentioned before that her family life at home was, you know, know, pretty unstable. And so, but she always mentioned Christmas was the time that her mom would really try to be homemaker and really try and have like a nice celebration.

She tried and have the like pot of like, you know, pot of like, you know, pot of like, you know, put in water, you know, yeah, make the whole house smell like that. Fruit cake. Fruit cake. All of that. She unfortunately, where I said that it would typically get ruined because fights would happen, but she really, you know, appreciate, still appreciate that time of the year. So she created the song because it's, it basically invokes the feelings that she wanted.

it to feel as a child during the holidays. I love that. And she wrote it at 22 years old, but she actually wasn't that far removed from being a child herself. Right. I love to know that personal reason is behind her coming up with her part.

And Luxury, what can you tell us about Mariah and Walter's working relationship? All right, well, let's talk about Walter Afanasi. He is the 50-50 co-writer of this song. Wow. According to the official records, and according to all interviews, there's no disputing there,

but there are disputes about other things. So we get into that in a second. First, just a little bit of a backstory about who our unsung friend is today. Walter Afanasia, if you don't know, the man has 13 number one songs including this one, which would be the 14th. I don't know if you count all the times

it goes to number one. Does that mean he has like 17 number ones? Because it's hit number one, like four or five times. I don't know. That's count of once. So I guess he's got 14 number ones. Because he had some smash number ones too that if you were waiting in them

would count as a million songs because my heart will go on. It's true. This is not a weighted system. It's just you get it or you don't. It's number one or it's number two or lower. This man has done that 13 times. He has two Grammys, including producer of the year, non-classical, and record of the year for My Heart will go on with Celine.

From Titanic. And he's nominated for the upcoming songwriters Hall of Fame. So maybe he'll get in 2025. He certainly seems to deserve it. He starts life as a jazzer. He's a musician. He's a keyboard specialist. And he's playing with jazz fusion violinist Jean-Luc Ponte in the late 70s, early 80s.

He forms a band with future collaborator, Narada Michael Walden, called The Warriors. And Narada Michael Walden is another huge monster producer. And he was a drummer in the Mahavishnu Orchestra. These guys are monsters, like musicians, like musicality-wise, like in terms of what, there's skills on instruments. By the way, Randy Jackson is on base in that band. So it's a super group of sorts. Oh, wait, from like American Idol?

Yeah, that's that Randy Jackson. Okay. He sticks with Mariah for a while. Yeah, this crew sticks together, like, through some of this. But he says with her through like emancipation to be me. Okay. So he made he, okay, we're going to talk about the split.

The split that happened in the late 90s. The Tommy Moraye split has a corresponding musician split. So it sounds like some people went with Tommy and some people didn't. And that had some consequences. So he's a session player. He plays on Aretha Franklin's Freeway of Love 1984. He's synths on Tina Marie's lover girl. So he's getting all these hits.

And then he's on Whitney Houston's second self-titled album. I had to double check this. Her debut is Whitney Houston, but her second album is Whitney. Yeah. Wow, creative. Yeah. No, I know the difference. He wanted another chance to have that debut. So he's on, I want to dance with somebody. He's playing keyboards on so emotional. He's really in there on a lot of these great 80s records. All right, so she becomes a Mariah Carey collaborator in around 1989 when Narda Michael Walden introduces him and they work on Vision of Love Together. So Tommy Motola takes notice of his work and says, who's this guy doing all the tracks, all the music and he's told, hey, that's an artist, Guy Walter. He does all the program. He does the music.

And Tommy says, oh, I want to meet this guy. And so they start working together. Love takes time, which is Mariah's second number one. It's the two of them. And he's the co-writer and producer on her second, third, and fourth LPs. She co-wrote Hero. She co-wrote One Sweet Day. They are, they are thick and thin. They write apparently hundreds of songs together in this period. So they work together until they stop working together, which seems to coincide by all the interviews I read with the marriage ending. So it sounds as though Mariah and Tommy's marriage ending led to people having to take sides. So he went with Tommy.

He went with Tommy. Sounds like he went with he went with Tommy and, um, but we're going to get into that in more detail a little bit later on this episode. All right. Well, after the break, we'll dive into how all I want for Christmas is you was made and get ready to hear those isolated and marvelous Mariah carry vocal stems with our guest, Leslie Guam. We'll be right back.

Lexury, I got to say I am under the gun, man. Listen, we have to go out of town to visit family. We actually have to come back in time to host some family for the holiday season. And then we're going out of town again for New Year's Eve. It's a lot. That's too much. It's too much. Just don't do it.

Just don't do any of it. Just hide in the closet. I want to. I want to. But I'll tell you what I can't hide from, the amount of money that we're going to be putting out. If we don't get our stuff together, we got to understand it. It's easy to lose track of how much money you're spending. It's so hard to manage everything. So many details.

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you know, comes around at the end of the year. It's literally disgusting. I'm literally disgusted by all the money that I'm not having to spend right now and keep track of. You're right. It's actually disgusting. And right now, I'm checking my holiday spending category just to make sure I don't start the new year with a debt hangover. Well said. Monarch is. my essential year-end financial reset tool. You can link everything, investments, 401k's, property value, to get your true net worth and stay on top of end-of-the-year priorities like maxing out your contributions to your 401k or Roth IRA.

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Walk us through how all I want for Christmas is you got made. So here's how the song gets made, according to Walter, talking to Billboard in 2014. He says, we started to write what Mariah wanted to do and what Tommy wanted to do, which was a Phil Specter, old rock and roll 60 sounding Christmas song. I was sitting at the piano. I started playing this sort of boogie-wogie. Mariah picked up on what I was playing with my left hand, which was the melody from the bass line. She goes, oh, that's cute.

And she starts singing that melody, which became the opening line. I don't want a lot for Christmas. And then I go to the next chord. And this is kind of interesting because it sort of speaks to the unusual chords in the song. Walter is saying, I usually like to change things up a bit and I don't like it for everyone else to do it.

So I went to the minor chord and I repeated that. And then Mariah says, yeah, that's kind of cool. And we get a couple of cool chords in between. According to him, she says, yeah, that's kind of cool. Yeah, this is all his testimony from the Billboard interview in 2014. This is Walter's, Walter claims for you Hamilton fans out there. Exactly. We get a couple cool chords in between.

and the chords for the title, all I want for Christmas is you. And then I got the music pretty much done. Mariah would write the lyrics when I flew back to California. She would call and ask for feedback. Basically, the two of them wrote the song together at the piano, and then they went their separate ways for him to complete the production and for her to complete the lyrics.

And then she came to record the vocals. Now, this entire song, all the music, is coming from Walter and his computer. So Walter programmed the entire song, the intention being, of course, that it was just a demo to be reproduced by actual musicians who are on most of the other songs on this record. But there was something about the demo.

And as we get into it, you'll hear how demoy it is. All of these sounds, and this is the early 90s, mind you. So the computer music is still relatively new in terms of the entirety of a pop song being written in the box with all of these instruments. They sound fine. They sound passable, but they were never intended to be the final version.

What happened was, though, they tried to get some of the greatest in the business. They got great fill-in gangs. They got Omar Hakeem on drums. filling games we talked about on the Michael Jackson episode is all over Thriller, one of the greatest keyboard players of our era and they played the song, they recorded

it and it just didn't sound right. Tommy said it sounded too country. Two country. They lost the Christmas. Tommy had his pocket. He was like, it's gotta be there. Yeah. It can't be there, can't be there, can't be no hillbilly stuff and it can't be for the ghetto. It's got to be right in the lane.

I know you're trying to do a parody but he might actually sound like that. I feel like he does sound like that. I work with Dr. Buzz, in the Savannah band, listen. Part of it was the sound and part of it is just the replicatability of some of these parts. When we get into the piano parts, like that's crazy how fast, how many notes in such a small amount of time there is because of the tempo. It's 150 BPM.

So they just went back to the demo. And what's on the radio to this day 30 years later being a huge number one hit year after year is essentially, it was never meant to be on the radio. It is a demo. That reminds me of a lot of, like, Pharrell songs that he's on. A lot of times he was singing the hook, laying it for somebody else. And they're like, wait a second. This is good.

And next thing, you know, Farrell is on every single from 2006 to like 2012. Right, right. Yeah, no, he talks about on the daft punk song on Get Lucky. He didn't know that it would ever be the final version until he, apparently they sat him down in a locker room vault to listen to it. And he's like, oh, wait, that's me. He kept me? So don't overthink it, everybody. Don't overthink it.

All right. So let's start with the drums. So let's start where the drum fills come in. And I have in my notes so dinky in capital. These are very dinky fills. I don't think Walter would argue with me. And here they are. So that snare is so polite.

It sounds like me doing this right here. On the little table right here. The dinky fills is like my favorite New York punk band from 1979. The dinky fills. Dingy fills. Live at CBGBs. Totally. Only on cassette.

And then we get into the main beat, which sounds a little bit like this. He's got some triplet tambourines layered on top. They sound like this. I'll isolate that. So you can hear it separately. Walter is killing them drums. So those are 1994 programmed tambourine triplets.

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That's tambourine? We're in 12-8 time. It sounds like sticks on a high hat. I mean, everything sounds a little smaller and less final than it ought to. It's supposed to be this. It's what you would do with a wrist. Da-da-da-da-da-da.

And it sounds like this in the mix. Da-da-da-da-da. Here's your 12-8. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. one, two, three, four, five, six. Triple it, triple it. There's also like a timpani there. Let's listen to that timpani.

It's important. It's like the 808 of the orchestra. So you get a little pitch there. That sounds like the beginning of one, two step. Boom, don, don't, don't. Ladies and Jais and gentlemen. All right, and then there's a conga, which I'll play separate,

and then you'll hear everything together. Here's the conga. So it's the exact same sound every time because it's just going from one sound. I think back then, I don't think he had any sort of, velocity or any way to like have it be a little lighter a little bit harder. Can you play it again? Yeah, sure. It took me a second to realize where in the beat that is. I'll give you your triplets.

Yeah. And I'll bring the beat back. That's pretty much what's happening in the percussion section of this song. And like you said, it was built in the box essentially by by one dude. So it makes sense that all these things would be as we were saying, almost like placeholders potentially. They're placeholders. Their intention is to build something more I can sing on top of. That is their only goal is to have the song be something that inspires her, she knows what part goes where, when to sing, you know, are we going into the bridge, whatever is it the chorus? But yeah, that is in the final mix as well as this demo version. There's also, we're going to get now into some of our kind of classic Christmasy genre tropy sounds, starting with the sleigh bells. That's in Christmas in Hollis.

That's in, no, no, no, reinvention there. It's in Players Ball by Alcats. And I'll add the beats to that. So there's like your full percussion. There you go. So no song goes diamond off of just what we've heard so far. Yeah. Lots of finger drums. That's the key. As a drummer, seems kind of basic.

But let's get into some of the instruments now. I mean, you don't got to be a drummer to pick that's basic. But let's hear some of the instruments. Let's go back to, I believe it was called the Celeste. The Cheeleste. I did hear somebody from the St. Louis Choir on. you to pronounce it with the say lestay maybe there's some dispute in the music I just like the phrase say less so much so say lestay sounds right up my alley

en francais it be celestial which is where it comes from means heavenly and it starts the song and it sounds like this which by the way when I hear that the rhythmic nature of those notes makes me think of mr. sandman by the cordes totally yeah but I definitely hear the dance of the sugar plum fairies when I hear absolutely it evokes 1892 and then as as we mentioned before And then that same idea makes its way into all those Phil Spectre songs in the 60s. So we are many layers deep into like that. It sounds like snow's falling. Evocation, yeah.

The house is quiet because the kids have not awakened. It's all right there at the very top of the song, evoking hundreds of years of Christmasy songs. Can we talk about the bass? I feel like the bass is always so much fun when we talk about music. What do we have as far as the bass stems? We have a very, very basic baseline, which I'm pretty, you're going to stop calling this song basic. Okay, I understand it's a demo, but like relax. I'm trying to get it.

We're building it. By the way, that Che Leste was very, very distinct. Yeah. We've moved on from that. This sounds like it might have been performed one finger at a time, but let's listen together and see what we think. This is the bass part. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. You want to go back on your thoughts? Now I hear it. Are you impressed by this baseline? I'm just listening. That's all. I think that's an early kind of.

X-7 post-Synfeld like synth bass where it's programmed from a real bass, but it's like the sounds the same every note because a real bass player would have some variety to it. I'm pretty sure he's not playing bass. I think that just don't, don't, don't, don't. And let's give that to you with some drums just for context. Yeah, that's definitely a program. That's the same note, you know, instance of that notes being sampled in keyboard form and just don't, don't. So it's the same every single time. We heard that in the drums too. When we heard the notes, the drum fill, and it just It's like on the Tears for Fearers episode where we could like really identify that it was a programmed snare because the sound was the same. There's no variety to it. Like a real drummer, it'd be a little bit different every time. Yeah, one time you hit a little bit. A little bit. A little bit. The room changes a little bit of the air in the room. None of that's happening here. It's all in the box. It's all programmed. But it's still a hit. Well, this is where Walter earns his stripes. And I do believe from the telling of how the song got written, it does start with him playing piano. The performance here is obviously some common.

of him playing it and then tweaking it later by, you know, taking the notes in the, in the MIDI roll and, you know, either copying and pasting them or tightening them up to make them perfect. But this is very hard to play, especially throughout the duration of this song. This piano, which is nonstop. And here we go. Off to the races with Walter on piano. Like, that's this. Yeah. Do they do. Wow. The first of all, that's two parts. I don't think you can play. Maybe he can. I don't know how you do that. The bass notes. Do they do. Do they do. Do they do. Do they do. I mean, maybe he's doing that all in one take. That's crazy.

Four minutes of this. Well, his warrant routine has to be like nuts. That's so complex. It's simple, but just, it's this. By the way, what I'm doing is my right hand is shaking, waving, the thumb and the pinky are going back and forth being do-de-do-d-d-d-do-de-do-d-d-d-do. In the piano in the high part, here I'll play it again. It's like I'm going, come see, come saw.

A little feather here and north. Maybe. I'm doing the maybe. I'm doing maybe hands. That's what it is. I'm doing maybe hands. Listen. While the right hand's doing that,

the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. It's just over here going to do. Doubling that baseline. It's on that scale. To my undertrained public school who had very little money for the arts ears, I've long noticed that if you have,

I've always called it a broken scale. I think you in the past maybe referred to as an unusual scale. But to me it's a broken scale. It's like if you were to play a perfect scale, it would almost be out of place in a song. But like when I listen to some of my favorite songs, I'm like, I hear this escalation. And it sounds like it's almost the scale,

but they're like cool, unusual weird parts that like don't do what you're supposed to do in that scale. That's great. For my whole life, I've called that a broken scale. There may be an actual term for it. Please, cool. Well, no, no. I think what's interesting is I understand what you mean.

And the language for it, like I think one of the things that makes the song unusual and is sort of a foreshadowing for our songwriting dispute back and forth the beef that has since ensued is you are picking up on a thing in this song that is unusual, which is the chord changes. The chord changes map to the melodic choices. Like they are related. So what you're hearing is like, oh, I didn't expect us to go there. Yeah. I did not expect us to go to that chord and for that that note to be what we're hearing. So I'm going to talk about that absolutely in a second. Because you didn't hear that unexpected note. Yeah.

Like, regardless of John, like, you believe it says a song, and then a note that it's unexpected comes, you're like, oh. Yeah. Plot twist. Yeah, that's exactly. It's a plot twist. And that's when you're like, I'm on board with this. It's the unexpected that makes the song special.

And what's interesting is that baked into the unexpected, there's actually a layer of expectedness. In other words, it's yet another genre trope. That chord changed, one or two of the chord changes in the song, which are unusual, are actually very common to songs, not simply of this genre, but also the era. Let's talk a little bit about the minor plagal cadence. What we're doing before we go to the one

is we're doing this thing where the major four goes to the minor four. And it's unexpected. There's a note that we're sort of borrowing in there. And that's kind of the surprise that you're referring to, one of them at least. And I'll give you some examples just to make it clear what I'm talking about. Because we have heard this in many, many songs.

One of them, and very famously it shows up in the catalog a lot of this band. This is in my life by the Beatles. Six. And here we go. Major, minus. And back to the one. So that loop back to the one. What happened right before it is we were on the four.

It's the major four, which is what you would expect in that key. But then we suddenly drop one note, the third, a half step. That's all that happens. And it changes the entire feel of that moment. I just sounds like it's used to evoke some kind of emotion. It evokes what is, I mean, that's the, to me, it evokes a kind of melancholy. So I was thinking too. Right.

And it's in the context of in my life of the lyrical content. That's part of what Walter did in this song. See, he did chords that you weren't expecting that kind of temporarily delayed that need to get back to that one, which it ultimately does. And part of what we're talking about now with broken scales and such is this idea of like, I thought it was going to go here, but we're not there yet. Oh, it's building tension. It's going to get there eventually. It's going to get there. yet. I love that. It creates a sense of comfort when you get back home. Listen, we find this in

dozens of examples. It's in David Bowie's Space Odyssey. It's in Life on Mars. It's also in about six other Beatles songs. You're talking specifically about the minor plagal. We're talking about this major four to minor four minor plagal cadence. It shows up in a lot of songs, especially of that era. When it's in the 60s, though, you're kind of thinking back to an earlier era. And that shows up in the Mariah song that we're talking about today right here. This is the one. One, one. Now we're going to the major four, but now it becomes the minor four.

Now the bass note moved up, but that is still the major to the minor that we heard in the other songs that we've been talking about. So that shows up there. It gives you a sense of like, oh, that was unexpected, but pleasurable and melancholy. And reminds me of the 60s and the Beatles and all these associations. I hear some tubular bells in there. Can we talk about the bells? Yes, we can. Let's talk about the tubular bells. It's so, I mean, that's Christmasy right there, just the use of these bells.

Here, let me play it for you in the mix. I'll bring the piano and see you know where we are. And it's just reinforcing what our tonic is, what our root chord is. So it's really showing up in the chorus more than in the verse. And I'm going to go back and say that we were throwing our little subtle shade at those drums. But that little Congo hit that do, do, do. You're feeling that? That does a lot for the song, man.

The feeling works. Does a lot for the song. But sometimes you can't overthink it. You got to just lay it down where it's groovy, baby. Speaking of which, I did label this one. These are the sax pads, but I added silly because these, these are silly saxpads. This is not a saxophone player. It's not a dinky fill.

It's a silly sax. Let's go. Let's hear it. It's the did to do. I want to hear this. Is it called sex? Well, that's, that's intended to be a sax. It's a patch on a keyboard.

I don't think it's supposed to be a saxophone. Listen again. Well, even if it is, may it be, is it a successful accordion? Does it have to be a silly sax? What is this to you? Not a saxophone.

Like, really not a saxophone. It sounds like early digital instrumentation. It was, you might be absolutely right. It's 93, 94. Listen, no shade on. Look, Walter May this. Oh, that's a light for that. No shade.

When I say no shade, I mean a minimum of shade, but not none. Well, here's that same. It's called a Marcato, which is the accenting da-da-da. Here's that same thing on the strings, which is our last piece of the musical instrumental stems

before we get to the good stuff on top. So there's a sort of lower cello-base version of that high string. So I'll play all the strings together. And then here, finally, all of the instruments together, doing that Marcato. Markato.

And we're off to the races with the bump. So we have all these wonderful parts, and we have like these really cool chorus, but we can't do a Mariah Carey song without giving you the listeners a taste of those fantastic Mariah vocals. I'm willing to start anywhere.

I mean, like, you know, maybe we can hear the very beginning of this song because I feel like she comes in a champ on this song. That's right. And going back to our kind of list, you know, our checklist of Christmassy things to do in the Christmas song, we do have this slower intro,

like pretty much half the songs on that Phil Spectre record have it. And actually going back further, you know, trope of like the Tin Pan Alley era. All those great American songbook stories. Yeah, Drew Gellington, all those guys. Have a little bit of an intro and then you'll kind of kick into the actual song.

So let's listen to her intro. I don't want a lot for Christmas. There is just one thing I need. She gives you, she gives you so much on every note. You heard that the way she ended that? Wow. Yeah. When I hear that, I hear.

the longing, the emotion. She really means what she's saying in that. You can hear that desire every syllable. Some people hit the notes, you know? Ever forbid I ever wrote anything this good. I would probably just hit the notes. You know what I mean? But like you said, she makes every single note pregnant with meaning.

And you feel it inside your soul. Yeah, she's emoting your voice alone. And also, this is sort of a 90s thing. But like. Oh, yeah? No, that makes me Mary Joice he got in. I was singing

but that is a thing and I feel like in the 90s people did these runs which we started to realize just how much people were running toward the end of the 90s so that by the time

Christina Aguilera comes along and like you know Christina could take I love you and make a three minute song like just with just runs Just DJ too exactly

but this is when runs are not completely overdone and this is sort of like her saying hey this is I'm going to murder Right.

On Christmas. Yes, I sing R&B, too. Yes. Because also what I hear in that very long is, reminds me a lot of Luther Vandross's house and at home. Yes. He says with at the end, same kind of run. He's going down, she's going up.

Just stretching that note. But they're taking the same amount of steps. That melismatic way of taking one syllable and having multiple notes, like maybe a dozen notes, maybe two, you know, two octaves. Yep. That's leading up to a note that's not particularly grand. The you hear, the me and house is not a home. Neither one is grand.

No, it's actually like, it's landing the plane after you've done this long, long journey. When Duran Bernard was here, he brought up Luther Vandross in conversation with Mariah Carey. He said, Mariah Carey is female Luther with a whistle register. And I hear that in this song. Like you said, Luther tends to go down. So you could go, ooh, see, I didn't want to do that.

I'm glad you did it. Well, see, I know that I can't sing like Lupin, so I have no shame. No one can. But Mariah goes high, and it's wonderful. Okay, so there's four takes of Mariah, and she's basically quadrupling herself. So I'll play you one layer at a time. That's going through the entire track, by the way. And that's separate from the backing vocals, which we'll hear after we go through the leads.

So starting from verse one, and I'll give you one Mariah at a time. I don't want a lot for Christmas There is just one thing I need Don't care about the presents Three Underneath the Christmas tree Four I don't need to hang my stockin

There upon the fireplace That is so good Can you now play us some of that chorus that we know so well Make my wish come true All I want for Christmas Oh, we won for Christmas is you. Oh, we won for Christmas is four Mariah Carey. That's great.

She's crue-thrupled up. Oh my goodness. This reminds me a lot of, Faith Evans. She's a lot of this kind of vocal stacking in our songs as well. Like, as soon as I get home, like that chorus, you never hear the single voice. I still remember where I was the first time I heard as soon as I get home. I was actually driving home and I heard this song come out. I was like, ooh, this song goes so hard.

Kind of like how I met Big Boy from Outcast in an elevator, random. Is that true? I know. I know him. I've met him before. I thought I got this, but like, yeah. Wait, but wait. Oh, because you were in an elevator.

Why am I so dumb? You were like me and you on this elevator going to floor two? Exactly. But the vocal stacking is incredible. And it's also another not to art her R&B roots. Well, let's also bring in some of the backing vocals. Now, these are by Kelly Price. Wow, I did not know that.

Did not know Kelly Price. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Kelly Price, we're going to hear her vocals in a minute, but talk about an historic R&B career. Absolutely. She was Mariah's one of her lead backing vocalists for a while when she was singing with a choir. Up until the Daydream tour when she decided, you know, she actually watched Mariah, because Mariah would sing Hero alone.

She would clear the stage of backup singers and everything. And she watched Mariah do that, and she was like, it's my turn to do that for myself. I can't be eight feet from the moment. I was her moment. Yeah. And, I mean, it was tough because she and Mariah really loved each other. And it was a great gig. but it was time for to bark her own

and it worked. She had some smash hits pretty soon. I mean, friend of mine he proposed, and she's still quite the arnold tight right now. Kelly's a legend in R&B service. Does she work? And so her sister is also on backing vocals. Sean Ray, right? Do the two of them, do they work together now?

I don't think her sister is in the industry anymore, but I'm sure she probably sing with her when she needs to. Well, they're two of the three and the third is Melanie Daniels. And they all have gospel backgrounds, and I think you can hear that in the stack. So let's listen.

Oh my gosh, here we go. And I hear that Kelly Priceness in there. That's the sort of. Yeah, I hear it. And church. Call in response, very church, very colon response. I'll give you some context for that. So let's put all the vocals together in that moment.

And I, it gives it that meadiness that, you know, you feel when you listen to the song. It is worth noting. Interestingly, it's also a unison note. They are all singing the same note. They're not singing a harmony right here. So right now we are hearing four Mariahs and three backing vocals. So seven voices is singing two notes eventually. It's very interesting.

All I want for Christmas is you. And they all sing those notes. They're all in unison, all seven voices. It's so interesting. There's no harmony. Now I did find... Is that something that Phil did on a lot of his records, Phil Specter? Like when he's building the wall of sound, like did he tend to have backing vocals that

matched what Ronnie was singing? Absolutely right. That is a girl group thing. And I noticed that recently. I was listening to a banana ramma song and I was like, you know, they're not really harmonizing much. So it is,

I think, kind of a classic. There are harmonies in some of those same girlas. It's not for classic girl groups, obviously, uh, Supremes. But there's also a lot of three women singing the same note and making it more

powerful. I was going to say, what's really interesting about this song is that we have four voices and they're all very powerful voices. Very powerful voices. Very powerful. Yeah. These are all,

no, no, no, no. All right. So we know Mariah is queen of the, the bridge. I need to hear it. Please. Take us to the bridge. You want to hear that with the backing vocals too? Yeah, I'm always like so tempted to throw in the adlibs whenever I hear that.

Feel free. I won't do that today. Karaoke maybe. There's your harmony stack. That is the church choir. That is the church choir. I'll do that album. That's the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but the opposite.

Because it's not Mormons. It's kind of the opposite of Joseph Smith. Sorry, Joseph Smith. Oh, that's the best chord of the song right there, that last note. Here's what that entire thing sounds like together. Here's the bridge with those backing vocals together. Wow. Wow.

I mean, everyone always talks about Mariah and the whistle tone, of course. The Wizard is what everyone talks about Mariah. But her voice is so much more than that. Absolutely. Full and all four octaves. Yeah. And you really hear that here. The belting is so emotive.

I was in it. I was in it. I had to close my eyes. It was too much intensity. I didn't know you were doing it because I was doing it. And one last thing I got to play, it's that you. You! And to be clear, that's the last, all I want for Christmas is you.

If you needed the context, that is the ultimate you. You can't get youier than that you. You never hear the descent part. So that's great to hear that. I never hear it in the mix. I'll play it for you now with the backing vocals that come in, interspersed. And now we're starting to call and response.

The last minute of the song is, does it get churchier? This is exciting because this is the fade out. So let's hear what happens after the fade out. Because there's like another 60 seconds of singing here. Let's listen. How is this cutting room floor? Oh, that sounds real black. So Tommy was like, all right, that's enough.

Kill it. Kill it. Fade out. The public must never hear this. We get that extra that's 40 seconds after the fade out. And then there's one take that keeps on going because she was doubling, tripling, quadrupling. Let's just listen to this one.

Subur-da-doo-du-du-a-dwe-dweather-Juba-Dweebate. Okay, all right. All right, all right, all right. Here's my thing. Okay. All my friends who are also amy, they know that I have been begging Mariah, yes, because I know her, to make a jazz album. Her lower range is so rich

And if you don't think about that And I'm hearing that I'm like, I need it Jibbita Dwee I need it I got that scatting She's scatting Yes

Oh my gosh There's a clip of her singing Just with a piano And a jazz bar And it's beautiful And that's when I was like I need it I mean that's

I mean that's I mean that's Don't leave that money On the table Mariah Give us that jazz album The Grunge album Please. Look, this is just for Leslie.

They got 20 more seconds. It would be incomplete. This is the last 20 seconds. She's never heard before. Sorry, producer, John. That was like eight seconds long. Breath control, the diaphragm. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. Strong throughout. Yep.

Imagine the Vision of Love. That last known of Vision of Love and how is legendary? Similar. I mean, that last known and Vision of Love is one for the history books. At this point, it's safe to say that Mariah has created a whole brand out of Christmas. Right after Thanksgiving, we see her teasing this song on her social media pages. She's got plenty of Christmas sponsorships, partnerships, and commercial circulating. You know, there's a whole complex, if you will. Yep, Mariah Carey Christmas Complex.

Tagline, it's time. Yeah, but I mean, you can see her annual Christmas show that she's now on tour. I think it started off just like a show. My wife and some of her friends went to it recently and they said it was an amazing concert. It's great. I went to Hollywood Bowl. Yeah. It's really good, especially in L.A.

should typically will bring somebody out. Like she brought out JD last year, which is really funny because they're like best friends. So it was a great show to see. But then also she has partnerships with like Venmo. She has an Amazon partnership now where she actually is selling like inflatable Christmas decorations for like your yard. Oh man.

Yeah. I can have a big inflatable baraya on my yard? You actually can with her. Well, she's like in a Santa Claus thing like she has a sleigh. Yeah. And then she also has partnerships like Kay Jewelers, Victoria's Secret. So in addition to the money from performing and writing the song,

she's also getting all the extra bread. Does she want a one song partnership? I'm saying. Just saying, don't leave that money on the table, Mariah. And look, we obviously know with the success of the song that so many people love it, adore it. But there have been some folks who've come after Mariah because of the popularity of the song, specifically a country band called Vince Vance and the Valiance Luxury.

Can you tell us about what kind of beef they tried to start? with Mariah to sell some records. Right. Well, Vince Vance and the Valiants are a group from New Orleans who in 1989 wrote a song with the same title, All I Want for Christmas is You, sung by Linda Lyle. It sounds like this. So here's the thing. The bottom line is there's nothing in this song, which is the same as in the Mariah song. There are no melodic.

I thought that was Mariah. That wasn't Mariah, Carrie? Don't do that. You want to Lambley after you? I'm talking like that. No, I'm joking. It is the song title, which. which is the same and nothing else.

And the fact of it being a Christmas song with some of the Christmas tropes, but you cannot copyright. You can't copyright a song title, but it didn't stop them from seeking $60 million in their first of two lawsuits. In 2022, they filed legal action seeking $60 million in damages. And then they dismissed the case voluntarily, but then brought another case, a different case last year after hiring a new legal team. Significantly, the legal team that had filed suit and got a settlement for the song, Shake It

off by Taylor Swift. So they're like, let's go with someone who, who won. So that's currently in the midst. Yeah, although I also read that currently the judge's inclined to dismiss it. I mean, it should be dismissed. There really isn't anything there. What they're, what they're trying to trade on is, quote, Carrie's song features a, quote, unique linguistic structure, similar to his own tune. They have this list. Basically, what they've clearly done is looked at the blurred lines lawsuit and taken a page out of the playbook, which is that none of the things in that song were exactly the same, but things. were similar and they were encouraged.

These do not. These do not have any of the same feeling. Mariah has also been sued before. In her book, she talks about how she was sued for Hero and two of my things. She's like, again, I write all my stuff. Yeah. Hear the receipts, which is why you don't hear about any crazy settlements on her end. Good for her.

Unprecedented success for this song. But the relationship between Mariah and her co-writer, Walter, does go south. Can you tell us a little bit about that dispute? Yeah, it's unfortunate. Look, it sounds like from in the media, they're sort of talking to each other. So there's these interviews over the years, and you can tell they're reading each other's interviews. And Mariah claims in a few places, not just also on her DVD, and she did like a special on

Amazon. So she's increasingly over the years, it sounds like in the storytelling, starting to leave Walter out of it and maybe increase the earliness of when she wrote the song. For example, she said in Billboard a few years ago, I am proud of the song that I, quote, basically wrote as a kid on my little Cassio keyboard. She says, quote, I put on it's a one. wonderful life downstairs. You could hear it playing throughout the house. And I went into this small room and there was a little keyboard in there and I started playing. So a little bit later,

you start to see the Walter interviews over the years because almost every year he gets, you know, call to do an interview about the song. And before that, he's sort of ignoring it. He's not mentioning, he just sort of tells the same Phil Spectre and the piano and this and that that story that we've been hearing since the 90s. But by 2018, he's starting to say, quote, my memory may be a little different from Mariah's. So in 2013, things get a little beefy. Mariah Tells Access Hollywood referring to the song, she's like, trust me, there are so many parts, I'm like,

ugh, I hate that right there. Why do they make me keep that? Because it was before I had full control over everything on the record. And somebody would be like, no, just leave that note. Really, it's good. When I saw this quote, I was like, that's really interesting. It's been 20 years. She's really processing, you know, importantly,

who she was back then. And this song is obviously evoking Christmas for all of us, but it's also evoking the story of her life then when she hears it. So maybe she's starting, when I read that, it was very poignant to me because I made me realize that if she had the strength and power that she did in her later years at the time, might have been a different song. She might have made different choices. She might have fought harder for a thing that at the time she didn't feel like she could fight for. Yeah, we would have seen hip hop Maria way earlier.

We would have seen hip hop Maria way earlier. Absolutely. Basically, what comes next is that Walter chooses his words carefully in a few interviews because he's starting to get some hate on the internet from Mariah. fans who are starting to believe that Walter had nothing to do with the song. So it sounds like Walter's getting defensive and he's going every single year at this time I have to defend myself because a lot of people just don't believe I'm a co-writer of the song. And finally in 2022, he goes on this podcast called Hot Takes and Deep Dives and just lets loose. We don't have to get into all the ugly things he says, but basically he says to claim that she wrote a very complicated

chord structured song with her finger on a Cassio keyboard when she was a little girl, it's kind of a tall tale. So that is the back and forth. Which made him, sound even better to the lambal. I'm sure that really helps. I'm sure that really helps. Some little girl's gonna play what I. Hey, it's Tommy Motoli. I'll tell you what really is.

He probably didn't do himself any favors with that. The thing is, people just have to read the liner notes. There's never been a moment where he wasn't credited as a songwriter. That's true. 50, 50, you know, how 50 is split, you know, whatever. Who did what? Yeah, exactly.

But that's always been the case. So who just have to pay more attention. Yeah. Look, we've already talked about how all I want for Christmas is you is a massive song. But get this. This song holds three Guinness World Records. holds the record for the highest charting holiday song on the Hot 100 by a solo artist, the most stream track on Spotify in 24 hours, and the most weeks in the UK singles top 10

chart for a Christmas song. And when the song topped the charts again in 2020, Mariah became the first artist to land number one hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in four decades. Wow. That's right. That's insane. There you go, Mariah. So with all that said, Leslie, what do you think is the legacy of all I want for Christmas

is you? Will it stand the test of time? I mean, David Foster himself said, this is the last song that's going to be cried for Christmas canon after that. The door closed. And I have to believe, I mean, granted, my personal food's canon includes

in syncs, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and they date to Christmas with a Disney Child, but that's just me. But, I mean, honestly, somebody like David Foster says that, you got to listen. I mean, the song, you hear it everywhere. You hear stores, commercials, whatever.

No one doesn't know this song. It's such an indelible part of the holidays. Absolutely. Absolutely true. And make sure that Mariah stays relevant it forever. Yes. She will never go away.

How about you, Diallo? You know, I'm a fan of this song. I'm a fan of the Christmas canon. I'm not sure we need any more Christmas songs. This is my theory. It's like, you know, anytime nowadays a person that says, we've got enough. No, seriously, like, whether they're like just a random celebrity or a band or a rap group or an armbia.

Like, when I hear you're coming out with a Christmas album, it sounds so cynical to me. Like, it just sounds like, hey, I want to, you know, it's like winning the music. musical lottery. It's like, hey, I might create a song that's going to be around for as long as all I want for Christmas is you by Mariah Carey. And I just, I feel like unless you have something to add to the canon that's not already there, maybe sit this one out. I use the example of Quad City DJs have a song that I absolutely love what you want for Christmas. It was basically like if two live crew did a Christmas song. And it's one of my favorites. Uncle Luke. Hey? That's like a perfect song. That's everything I like. I feel very religious. But, uh, I meant to it. Hootie Bay's vocoders. But listen, you take, you take 12 days of Christmas and you put a Luther Campbell beat underneath

it and it's the Quad City DJs with one of my favorite all-time Christmas sauce. Again, I have no problem with people. One of my favorite ones is I'm spending Christmas with a Dalek, which is a Dr. Who song. But Dr. Who theme song, I should say. But unless you're bringing something new to the canon, maybe don't do one more song about mistletoe. I mean, you'd be really intentional, like with, uh, Ryan Curious Christmas album, she said, I mentioned, she had made three original songs,

but she was very intentional about making one that feels like church, so that she was born on this day. Then you would have all the one for Christmas is you, which is like a throwback. And then we have the slow jam, which is Missy Musil's Christmas time. So, like, just don't make stuff, just be making it. Yeah. If you're making the Christmas song because you want to do a Christmas song, I guess that's cool. But if you're just doing it because you think you might hit the musical lottery, maybe do something for a holiday.

Thanksgiving's not getting a lot of love. Try putting together a Thanksgiving playlist, y'all, and it's not as easy as you would think. After you do over the river and through the woods, you start running out of stuff really quick. So again, there are other holidays. Let's take a stab at those. All right, Leslie, it's been great to have an actual lamb on our show today. But now it's time to put your Mariah Carey skills to the ultimate test. Here come the Lions.

We're going to play a game with you called Six Degrees of Mariah Carey, so here's how it's going to happen. Luxury and I are going to give you an artist and you need to link them to Mariah in six steps or less. Okay. Okay. You can connect them through samples, artists they've collaborated with basically a six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with musical icon Mariah Carey. So we challenge you to connect Mariah to Jodice. You've got 60 seconds. Oh, okay.

Mariah Carey produced a fantasy remix with Puff Daddy. But she did. Puff Daddy worked at Uptown Records, which is where Jodacy was signed. There you go. She didn't need six steps. We give it up for the ultimate lamb. Give it up for. Beat the clock big time.

Leslie Guam. She killed that. I'm so impressed. By the way, there was a baby face connect too, but we won't even get into that. Oh, yeah. What's my prize? What do I win? Our respect.

We win our respect. We've got one last thing before we end this episode. It's time for one more song. This is the segment. where we share a deep cut or hidden gym with you, the one song nation, and with each other. Today, I want to go first because I'm so excited. I just discovered this song. I'm going to hop right in.

It's called So I Just by Suria Sen. I mean, listen, you've got a showbiz and AG sample in there. Next level nighttime remix for those. Keep it track at home. He interpolates a kid cutty lyric for the chorus. And I just love the sound. It's like my favorite era of UK House and like that sound of Disclosure had about. 10 or 12 years ago with a solid MC who knows his hip hop rapping over the beat.

It's music that makes me want to go out in London for a night of fun. And I do wish that there were more of this style of like, you know, you've got Suria Sin, you've got a Gets, you've got other people who I don't think they've blown up here in the US, but they're basically rapping over house music. I just, I wish this was more of a scene here in the US. What did you think of that one? I mean, I think it is a little bit of a scene in the US. the U.S.

You just know where to go. And you stay up. Nobody's telling me. And stay up very late. Don't go to work the next day. Right. Exactly. That's the only way.

Well, listen, if anybody knows where that scene is in L.A. or New York or even in Atlanta, just DM me because I will come there. I will support that. And yeah, what did you think, Blake? I know we have a lot of similar taste. Dude, that has everything I like in a track. The disclosure thing really had me thinking about, yeah, like the deep house sound of a bunch of years.

It sounds fresh to my ears again. It never really goes out of style of deep house. It never really doesn't. And I also want to say UK rap, I think sometimes gets a bad thing, sometimes here in the U.S. Because we think it's all, because we think it's all like Central Sea. And there's so much diversity in the UK sound that I just want to see a little bit. I want to see a little bit of their diversity start blowing up over here. Leslie, you brought in a one more song.

Yes, I do have one more song, actually. I am, you know, representing the Lambley here. And as I discussed earlier, our album is Butterfly. Okay. That is the album for the majority of Landlady. That's the one? It was. Okay.

And what's the song from Butterfly? Fourth of July. There and leave the world behind on that. Fourth of July. Man, still sounds like Christmas. It doesn't sound like Fourth of the Gillette. They had the chicken of birds in the background and everything that didn't sound. The birds are south of the winter.

My girl loves her holidays. Fourth of July is such an amazing song. I'm glad you drew that connection. I'm glad you drew that connection because I was like, oh, for the July. No, that's another holiday that needs more song. I mean, it's so. Honestly, the lyrics are it's all about being outside with, you know, the person you love and fireworks and everything. And it sounds like what you're hearing.

Like you feel like you are in the grass with your lover when you hear it. That's really cool. Luxury. My man. One more song. What do you got? So there's a song that's huge at Christmas in England that I had never heard in my life until I was in my, I guess, 20s. And I was playing bass very briefly for a band in San Francisco with two British American brothers.

And they were like, look, we're doing a Christmas song for this. benefit and I'd never heard it in my life before. So there's probably a divide right here for podcast listeners. A bunch of people will be like, you don't know this song, would you crazy? And then we'll see in this room. Who knows this song? It's Slade. Merry Christmas, everybody.

Do you guys know this song? I don't think I've heard that. No. This is not big in America, but it is like the number one song in England or one of the top Christmas songs in England. It's the Mariah Carey Christmas song. Of pub culture in the UK. I mean, according to the stats, Mariah Carey's

all of Chris' numbers you was doing numbers in the UK as well. It might have kicked Slade to the curve at this point, yeah. I don't know what it is about maybe because they sound British. I'm assuming Slade is British. Oh, yeah, Slate are very. Very British. It reminds me one of my favorite videos on social media last year. This is a clip from a video where someone has made up fake lyrics for Paul McCartney's

Christmas song versus John Lennon's Christmas song. This is called Paul versus John on Christmas. This is fake, but it does sum up. the differences in their personality makes me laugh every time. It's Christmas time. Get out the wine. Uncle Jim's in his favorite jumper.

It's Christmas day. People are dying. Go fuck yourself. I was like, what better distillation of Paul versus God could ever exist. Vine energy. Was that six seconds long, literally? Is that a vine? It's not very long.

That is beautiful. It's not very long. As always, if you have an idea for one more song, you can find us on Instagram and TikTok. you can find me on Instagram at Diallo, D-A-A-L-L-O, or on TikTok at Diallo-R-R-L. And you can find me on Instagram at Luxury, L-U-X-X-U-Y, and on TikTok at Luxury X-X.

You can also watch full episodes of One Song on YouTube right now. Just search for One Song podcast. We'd love it if you like and subscribe. And if you've made it this far, I think that means you like this podcast. So please don't forget to give us five stars, leave a review and share it with someone you think would like it. It really helps keep the show going.

All right, Leslie, we're going to end this thing right about now, luxury. Thank you so much for being on our show. Thank you for having me. Thanks let me crash. I learned so much. We couldn't have done it with that show. She is executive producer of the show, Leslie Guam. I am producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist, luxury. And I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle. And this is one song. We'll see you next time.