It's Time!

When the holiday season comes around, there are many pieces of literature and movies that most people think about such as the famous scenes from the film Love Actually and the rhyming lines from the poem Twas the Night Before Christmas.  Yet, the most iconic piece is the opening chords to “All I Want for Christmas is You.” The song was released in October of 1994 by Mariah Carey and has become one of the most record-breaking holiday songs of all time, even achieving the Guinness World Record for Highest-Charting Holiday (Christmas/New Year) Song on the Billboard US Hot 100 by a solo artist in 2020. Carey created one of the biggest modern holiday songs of all time but how was she able to keep it playing in retail stores for years to come? By breaking the usual standards of holiday music. 

 The earliest forms of Christmas music came during the 12th century through the use of traditional hymns. It wasn’t until the 16th century that more commonly known holiday songs were made, like “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “O Christmas Tree,” and “Silent Night.” During the 18th century, hymns and carols became popular again, with most originating in England. It was not until 1942 when the first Christmas album, Bing Crosby: Merry Christmas, was released and the genre of modern Christmas music was created.  Many other music artists, like Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, The Beach Boys, Louis Armstrong, and Phil Spector, went on to create their own Christmas albums. The genre eventually died out for a period and no music artist put out Christmas albums. It wouldn't be until the mid-1990s that the genre would come back to life. Walter Afanasieff was the producer and writer on Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”  In 2014 he gave an interview for Billboard for the 20th anniversary of Carey’s album Merry Christmas. When asked if he believed that “All I Want for Christmas Is You” would be a hit, he said “Nooo. 20 years ago, Christmas music and Christmas albums by artists weren’t the big deal that they are today.”

So how did Carey bring back the modern Christmas genre in the mid-90s? I believe that Insider said it best: “It [All I Want for Christmas Is You] doesn’t sound like it belongs to a single era. Instead, it embraces musical traditions that range from the 19th-century Nutcracker to 60s rock and roll.”  Carey used a technique called “Wall of Sound,'' created by popular 60s producer Phil Spector. When Afanasieff first started to work with Carey on Merry Christmas they wrote a couple of songs, “a ballad-y type of song, classical/religious song and the final one being a Phil Spector, old rock n’ roll, sixties-sounding Christmas song.” Carey took the instruments and similar chord progression from the Nutcracker and mixed it with Spector’s “Wall of Sound” technique to make what is now “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

Carey’s mixing of eras is what led to her creating one of the greatest modern Christmas songs of all time and would be the song stuck in our heads for each holiday season that rolls around.