Yes, of course this is Mariah Carey’s song, but the squeaky-clean Piano Guys get the nod here because they assembled a Lego-mation video that uses the pain-in-the-foot building blocks to pay tribute to just about every classic Christmas movie, and they set it to the only tune of the past 40 years to enter the holiday songbook.
Carey’s much-loved standard has charted every Christmas since its original 1994 release and has earned more than $60 million in royalties — quite a haul considering it took her and co-writer Walter Afanasief a total of 15 minutes to write and compose. Afnasief recalled,
I started playing some rock ‘n’ roll piano and started boogie woogie-ing my left hand, and that inspired Mariah to come up with the melodic [Sings.] “I don’t want a lot for Christmas.” And then we started singing and playing around with this rock ‘n’ roll boogie song, which immediately came out to be the nucleus of what would end up being “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”
That one went very quickly. … It was very formulaic, not a lot of chord changes. I tried to make it a little more unique, putting in some special chords that you really don’t hear a lot of.
Apparently he succeeded: One music critic counted 13 distinct chords in the final production. Here’s Carey’s version — I think it’s the first of several she recorded, because the vocal pyrotechnics are relatively restrained — but I have to admit that the fact she was singing this to Tommy Mottola (they were married about a year when she wrote it) kind of ruins it for me.
And, just because I love this guy, here’s Naudo Rodriguez finger-pickin’ it on Tenerife.
