Mariah Carey has been sued over alleged copyright infringement with her perennial festive hit All I Want For Christmas Is You.
As reported in Billboard, it is the second lawsuit she has faced from songwriter Andy Stone – who performed under the name Vince Vance – who filed then withdrew a similar claim in 2022.
Stone released a similarly lovelorn song of the same name in 1989 with his group Vince Vance & the Valiants, reaching No 52 in the US country singles chart in 1994 after receiving extensive radio play during Christmas 1993. Carey’s song was recorded and released in 1994.
Stone’s lawsuit claims: “The phrase ‘all I want for Christmas is you’ may seem like a common parlance today, in 1988 it was, in context, distinctive […] Moreover, the combination of the specific chord progression in the melody paired with the verbatim hook was a greater than 50% clone of [Stone’s] original work, in both lyric choice and chord expressions.”
Stone is being represented by Gerard P Fox, a lawyer who represented two songwriters in a similar copyright infringement case against Taylor Swift and her song Shake It Off, which resulted in an undisclosed settlement in 2022.
Carey has not responded to the lawsuit. The Guardian has contacted her management company for comment.
Carey co-wrote the song with Walter Afanasieff, though each of them has described the circumstances differently.
In 2021, Carey said: “When I first wrote that song I was very, very early on in my career and I was still thinking about childhood stuff when I did wish for snow every year … I started writing that on a little DX7 or Casio keyboard that was in this little room in the house that I lived in at the time in upstate New York lifetimes ago. Just writing down everything that I thought about. All the things that reminded me of Christmas that made me feel festive that I wanted other people to feel.”
Afanasieff disputed that claim in a 2022 interview. “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,” he said, though Carey hasn’t claimed to have written all of the song’s music prior to their collaboration.
The pair came together in the summer of 1993, with Afanasieff describing their collaboration as “like a game of ping-pong. I’d hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me … I started playing a boogie-woogie, kind of a rock. Mariah chimed in and started singing ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas’.” This session formed the “nucleus” of the song, Afanasieff has said. “Then for the next week or two Mariah would call me and say, ‘What do you think about this bit?’ We would talk a little bit until she got the lyrics all nicely coordinated and done.” The song was then recorded and completed in 1994, with Carey layering her voice in a choral arrangement that was “inspired by Phil Spector’s wall of sound formula”, she has said.
Stone’s lawsuit mentions the alleged discrepancies in the story, claiming: “Carey has, without licensing, palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own. Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun. This is simply a case of actionable infringement.”
In Stone’s song, sung by Lisa Burgess Stewart, lyrics include: “All that I want, it can’t be found / underneath the Christmas tree […] You are my dream come true / Santa can’t bring me what I need / ’cause all I want for Christmas is you.”
Carey’s song features similar themes: “I don’t care about the presents / underneath the Christmas tree […] Santa Claus won’t make me happy / with a toy on Christmas Day […] Make my wish come true / All I want for Christmas is you.”
Stone filed his first lawsuit against Carey, Afanasieff and Sony Music Entertainment in June 2022 but filed to dismiss the case in November that year.
With its sleigh-ride tempo and acute sense of yearning, Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You has become arguably the defining song of contemporary secular Christmas. It reached No 2 in the UK in 1994, then, following the advent of downloads and streaming, it returned to the charts in 2007 and has appeared every year since, finally hitting No 1 in 2020 and again in 2022.
It has also topped the US chart numerous times since its first No 1 placing in 2019, and spent 12 weeks at No 1 in the 2022-23 festive season thanks to its ubiquitous popularity on streaming services and across radio.
In anticipation of another year of success, Carey resurrected the song with a new video posted to social media on November 1, depicting her banishing Halloween and ushering in Christmas.
