Joe Harker
The co-writer of iconic Christmas song 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' has claimed that Mariah Carey lied about the creation of the terrific tune.
Everybody knows 'All I Want For Christmas Is You', the song is pretty much the main thing keeping the whole festive period together.
Christmas hasn't really started until you hear the song, which makes it back into the charts each year as people just can't get enough of the tune.
Alright, that's not entirely true as there are a few people who can't stand it and you've got to spare a thought for retail workers forced to listen to it over and over again for days on end until it just becomes torture.
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Still, by and large it remains incredibly popular and Carey still does pretty well out of the 1994 Christmas song, earning her somewhere around $2 million a year.
However, the song's co-writer Walter Afanasieff recently claimed that the singer had been telling 'tall tales' about the invention of the tune.
Speaking on an episode of the Hot Takes & Deep Dives podcast, he claimed Carey had started making up falsehoods about the origin of the song in the last decade or so.
He said: "We were both on the same page about how we wrote 'All I Want For Christmas Is You', there was never any alternate story until probably 10 years ago.
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"When she started to hint at the fact that, 'Oh, I wrote that song when I was a little girl!' But why weren't you saying that for 12 or 13 or 15 years prior to that? So it just sort of developed in her mind."
No other writers besides Afanasieff and Carey are credited with making 'All I Want For Christmas Is You', which was recorded for her fourth album 'Merry Christmas'.
Afanasieff is referring to claims Carey has made in her 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey where she says she 'actually did bang out most of the song on a cheap little Casio keyboard'.
In his version of events he was playing a tune on the piano when Carey started singing and they worked from there, with Afanasieff doing most of the music and Carey being the driving force behind the lyrics.
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The co-writer went on to say Carey couldn't have come up with the song at a younger age, criticising her and claiming she 'doesn't understand music'.
He continued: "She doesn't play anything, she doesn't play keyboard or piano.
"She doesn't understand music, she doesn't know chord changes and music theory or anything like that. She doesn't know a diminished chord from a minor seventh chord to a major seventh chord."
"So to claim that she wrote a very complicated chord-structured song with her finger on a Casio keyboard when she was a little girl, it's kind of a tall tale."
Earlier this year the song was the subject of an attempted lawsuit, with songwriter Andy Stone claiming that Carey and Afanasieff nicked the title from a 1989 song he wrote.
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Stone later dismissed his own case without prejudice, meaning he could launch another lawsuit in the future.
LADbible have contacted Mariah Carey's representatives for contact.