If you walk around a shopping mall, turn on the radio, or go to a coffee shop between
Thanksgiving and Christmas you’re gonna hear this song.
I don't want a lot for Christmas
That’s Mariah Carey’s 1994 hit “All I want for Christmas Is You.”
It’s one of the most often played Christmas songs ever.
And it happens to be one of the only Christmas songs written in the last 20 years that has
reached the same popularity of the American Christmas standards that came before it.
So, here’s a question: What makes Mariah Carey’s song sound so incredibly…
Christmassy?
… aside from those sleigh bells.
One of the greatest Christmas albums of all time is A Christmas Gift for You from Phil
Spector.
It was originally released in 1963 to little fanfare but then it was reissued in 1972.
At that point it instantly became a classic.
And if you look at Mariah Carey’s song it is a direct style study of that 1972 Phil
Spector Christmas album.
The arrangement is just down to a tee.
That’s Adam Regusea.
He teaches journalism at Mercer University but studied music and composition.
Most directly she’s trying to imitate a song titled “Christmas (Baby Please Come
Home)”
You can hear that so very clearly in how the intro of both songs are structured.
Christmas!
Snow's coming down!
I don't want a lot for Christmas
But, if you look a little bit deeper into Mariah Carey’s song you’ll see another
link.
One to the best selling song of all time: 1942’s “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin
performed by Bing Crosby.
And to find that similarity you’ve got to look at the chords.
It’s all in the chords.
A chord is 3 or more notes played together.
“Christmas (Baby please come home)” that Phil Spector song, I think that only has 4
chords in it.
It's a 4 chord rock song.
There’s a lot more variety of chords used in “All I want for Christmas is You” and
they harken back to a time when popular music was largely informed by Jazz.
A Jazz standard might have 9 different chords in it and chords of lots of different kinds
and flavors.
Not just majors and minors but diminished and augmented and 7ths and 9ths and all that
kind of stuff.
And there is one very special chord in Mariah Carey’s song that gives it such a classic
sound.
It’s no coincidence that that very chord is also played in “White Christmas.”
So this is not going to sound great, I’m playing it off my iphone.
We’re putting both songs in the key of C for comparison.
So Carey starts on a tonic chord.
A home chord.
Chord one.
“I don’t want a lot for Christmas”
One seven.
“There’s just one thing I need”
Four chord.
Subdominant chord.
“I don’t care about the presents”
And here’s the special chord.You could call it a diminished two seven chord?
“Underneath the Christmas tree”
"I just want you for my own"
So the effect is going from a dominant chord and kind of melting into this delicious spicy
warm little diminished chord.
Now if we were to compare that to Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” we see an incredibly
similar progression culminating that very very special chord.
Irving Berlin starts this phrase with a tonic chord
"Where the tree tops glisten and children listen"
There’s that special chord.
"To hear sleigh bells in the snow" To me the right word is just melting.
You know it's like snow melting by the fire.
it’s these Jazzy chords that give Mariah Carey’s song that kind of classic early
20th century Christmas Jazzy sound.
And it's just the most Christmassy sound in the world.
I don't know why.