When the record company came knocking, Mariah Carey wasn’t sure about making a Christmas album.
“I felt it was too early in my career,” she said in a recent interview, recalling the early ’90s.
But she had always loved Christmas, and so she got to work on arrangements for some of her favorite seasonal classics, like “Joy to the World” and “Silent Night,” and filled her recording studio with vibrant decorations like trees and lights. All she and her writing partner Walter Afanasieff needed were some original songs.
Then one late night, she recalled, the distinctive opening melody line of one song came to her as she tapped it out on a small Casio keyboard — “ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding,” she sang over Zoom. For the lyrics, she said, she racked her brain for something that felt meaningful. Then, “I started thinking about: ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas.’”
Thirty years after its release in 1994, that song, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” has become one of the longest-charting singles in any genre, spending 65 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100, and perhaps the best-known original holiday song of the last half-century. The album, “Merry Christmas,” has sold 18 million copies and would become synonymous with the season, blasting from cars, mall speakers and party playlists, and cementing Carey’s role as the Queen of Christmas. And the season? Well, that begins on Nov. 1 — when Carey has declared, “It’s time.”
Carey spoke with The New York Times ahead of a 21-date holiday tour that starts this month. It comes as she is teasing new, non-Christmas music, in what would be her first studio album in six years.
“It’s really rewarding, and I’m just grateful and thankful for it and for all the people that come up and say, ‘I love your music,’ or, ‘I listen to your Christmas music in July’ — that started to become a thing,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to do this for my life, and so now we get to do it.”
In the early 1990s, when Carey’s star was on a rapid ascent, writing an original Christmas song at such a high point — and an early point — in one’s career was rare.
There was precedent in the ’60s: While the Christmas genre had long focused on orchestral sounds and spiritual themes, the producer Phil Spector’s 1963 album “A Christmas Gift for You” with the Ronettes and Darlene Love brought a fresh take to the genre with the Wall of Sound-style production that Spector was known for. It featured new music like Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and vibrant arrangements like the Ronettes’ version of “Frosty the Snowman.” Motown artists like Stevie Wonder also brought new life to the genre with their own holiday records.
Those influences, along with hymns and gospel, could be felt in Carey’s album, said Maureen McMullan, senior concert producer and former assistant chair of the voice department at Berklee College of Music in Boston. But it was also something else entirely.
“Her album set the standard and really kind of redefined what a Christmas album could be,” McMullan said.
“She is bringing in a lot more contemporary influences — still very much respecting the contemporary gospel traditions, but then having original songs on there, which was quite novel,” McMullan said. The album included two other original songs written by Carey and Afanasieff.
Other artists have credited Carey with inspiring them to jump into the genre, like the powerhouse vocalist Kelly Clarkson.
“When Mariah came out with her first Christmas record, she changed the game for all of us,” Clarkson said in an email, adding, “She paved the way for all of us to be able to have a chance at creating original Christmas songs because she proved to the industry how not only lucrative it could be — but how magical it can be to have a record that is a part of your life every year.”
The musician Carlos Simon said, “I’m always studying the elements of Carey’s music that make it so easy to enjoy.”
Simon, who is also the composer-in-residence at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, is releasing an E.P. of Christmas music this month.
Countless theories have been offered about what made “Merry Christmas” so good. Among them, Simon said: a mix of relatability, tradition and crossing genres, with “Motown-style backing vocals.” Then there is Carey’s famed vocal range coming to a high-pitched apex in the “yoooooooou” many of her fans attempt to reach.
(“It certainly isn’t a Mariah Carey song without hearing her sing to the rafters,” Simon said.)
But Carey has described it as less of a formula and more of an ode to the season.
In her 2020 memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” Carey described tense moments during childhood Christmases amid dysfunctional family dynamics. “I set about creating my own little magical, merry world of Christmas,” she wrote. “I focused on all the things my mother struggled to create; all I needed was a shower of glitter and a full church choir to back me up.”
That “little girl’s spirit and those early fantasies of family” were infused into “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” she wrote.
The song was famously featured in the hit Christmas movie “Love, Actually” in 2003 and in a host of commercials and other movies. It has been covered more than 400 times, according to the website Secondhand Songs.
Though it was a hit when it was released, a promotional push and the ubiquity of streaming helped propel it to No. 1 on the charts for the first time in 2019, according to Billboard.
Since then, it has measured long runs on the Hot 100. Carey said there was a nostalgia factor at play: Listening to Christmas music, people “start reminiscing about different moments they’ve had.”
By 2019, Carey began announcing “It’s time” with a festive video posted to her Instagram page at about midnight each Nov. 1, decreeing that the season for tree-decorating, holiday playlists, and hot cocoa can officially begin.
Each year, the videos get more elaborate.
At first, “It wasn’t even really like an announcement,” Carey said. “People would say, ‘Hey, when is it OK to put our lights up and put our tree up?’ and ‘When do you do it?’ People would just ask me that because I guess they thought I was very Christmassy.”
Now, she said: “I love ‘It’s time.’ It’s so fun.”
People even begin to anticipate it before Halloween: Recently on social media, some have been posting videos of being haunted by the sounds of her album’s chiming bells and the singer’s breathy melismas — you know, those long vowel sounds — mysteriously ringing out from the distance.
Now, Carey is working on a new album for as early as next year, but she has not nailed down a release date, she said.
“I’ve been waiting to do this for a long time,” she said of the album. “There are some songs that I’ve been working on for a long time, and then there are some new songs and new people that I’m working with.” When pressed for details, she said, “I can’t give treats!” with a chuckle.
For now, fans have Carey’s 15-studio-album catalog and upcoming tour to hold them over.
The setlist for Carey’s tour this year is largely focused on Christmas, but also includes at least six songs from her other albums, including hits like “Fantasy” and “We Belong Together.”
What does Christmas look like at the Carey household? “Very high trees, my kids getting so many gifts that I’m just like, ‘What is happening?’” she said with a laugh.
Surprisingly, decorations do not go up on Nov. 1. She starts her tour on Nov. 6, and “there’s so much decoration on the tour, on the stage,” she said, “that you get into the spirit.” At Christmas time, she travels to Aspen, Colo., and that’s when her family puts up some decorations.
“It’s something that I look forward to all year,” she said. “Maybe people think it’s something that I put on, but it’s really my favorite time of year.”
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