Music
How Mariah Carey resisted recording ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’
The singer confessed on ‘The Bobby Bones Show’ that at the age of 25, she felt it was too soon to release a Christmas album.
It’s that time of the year again when "All I Want for Christmas Is You" becomes the soundtrack of our lives... in the supermarket, at the airport and yes, there it is lurking in the Apple Music Top 10 again. Mariah Carey has created the definitive festive song for the 21st century.
Released originally in 1994, the track which has reportedly seen Carey earn almost $2 million but the Christmas song almost didn’t get to see the light of day.
Industry novice
In 1994, the native New Yorker was still just starting out in the music industry and already had two studio albums under her belt with everyone predicting a promising future for that angelic voice when the idea of releasing a Christmas album was raised.
Carey, then just 25 at time felt it was far too early in her career to undertake such a project with these festive albums generally reserved for veterans of the business. Despite her early resistance, her undying love of Christmas saw a change of heart.
“I wanted Christmas to be perfect”
The New York artist has recounted this story on numerous occasions, most recently on The Bobby Bones Show. The presenter asked her if she could imagine that the song could be so successful and she was brutally frank: “No, this was at the beginning of my career. I had only made two albums, the record company proposed it to me and I felt it was too soon, and people do that later, and then I eventually said: ‘Ok, I really like Christmas, so I’m going to try it. ’”
“I wanted it to feel like a timeless classic, not sound like a song from the 90s or any other era,” she recalls. She set out to find the keys to this creative process within herself. “I started thinking, what are all the things I think about at Christmas? Lights, presents, stockings, fireplaces... I’ve always loved Christmas so much throughout my life, but I grew up in a family with little money and I couldn’t enjoy it in the same way as other kids did,” she once confessed to USA Today Entertainment.
She did. “I always wanted Christmas to be perfect, but for a lot of different reasons, it never ended up working out coming from such a dysfunctional family,” she says. She picked up the pen and saw the light: “So I think when I wrote it, I just put every ounce of longing for that perfect moment into it.” The rest is history.
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