Start with ambiance, darling. Light a candle if you like, but if you're serious about this — composing an original Christmas song, of course — what's really needed is the tree. A big perfumed cliché, sure, but its gravitas cannot be denied. You'd be hard-pressed to manifest the winter season — melodically or otherwise — without one, especially while the outside world is still frolicking when it's the summer solstice. This I have on good authority. Earlier this year, Mariah stepped inside her studio — the Atlanta-based outpost of a creative pad known as the Butterfly Lounge (the other is located at her L.A. home) and found the necessary decor missing. As a result, the vibes were quite off; she felt it, the music felt it, her sound engineer felt it: “He's like, ‘What's wrong?’ and I'm like, ‘Where's the tree?’ He's like, ‘They took it down, dah, dah, dah, dah.’ I'm like, ‘Who takes down a tree?’”
Mariah made do, hanging up a fleece throw decorated with her image (“It's me and the dogs and it's red”) to channel the requisite cheer. And, yeah, yeah, she's aware of how this comes across: “I know it sounds dramatic and silly and whatever, but it matters to me.” The studio is her domain. “I love writing. I love creating. I love working with musicians,” she says. And writing and recording for Christmas is especially sacred, lest the occasion become overly routine. Much ado is good for creativity. “I have this thing where I don't want Christmas music to become bland for me or take away a little bit of the festival.” Another tree was put in. “It wasn't great,” she deadpans, “but I just still like to see those lights. I like to see it when I'm singing, because the song goes” — she sings a line — “We gotta fall in love again at Christmastime.”
The song is “Fall in Love at Christmas,” a single Mariah cowrote and coproduced with her friend and writing partner Daniel Moore II and Kirk Franklin, featuring Khalid and Kirk Franklin. It was released early last month, at the top of what Mariah deems Christmas season. (At precisely midnight on November 1, our heroine, begowned in glittering red, took a baseball bat to pumpkin season in a video uploaded on Instagram.) “Fall in Love at Christmas” begins with slow-swaying, unfussy R&B, summoning images of cozy winter staples like cracking fire, mulled wine, and so forth. And then — “Then we go to church at the end of it,” as Mariah describes it, “because Kirk, come on, you can't help that.” The music video offers glimpses of the original Butterfly Lounge, located at Mariah's L.A. home, as the artists serenade one another during a bona fide jammy jam.
The holiday season would seem like a vocalist's dream and a songwriter's nightmare, with so many classics for artists to make their own and so little room to wedge in an original composition worth revisiting. Mariah is a rarity — a singer-songwriter and producer whose works define the season. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the twinkling opening of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” inaugurates winter better than the last falling leaf. “Christmas songs took a long time to permeate the culture,” Mariah tells me, speaking of the pre-streaming era from which that single emerged. But despite becoming synonymous with the holiday, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” written and released in 1994, didn't top the Billboard Hot 100 until 2019, becoming the first holiday song to do so since “The Chipmunk Song” went No. 1 in 1958.
Earlier this month, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America, which means it hit 10 million in sales and streaming in the U.S. That honor, for another holiday song record, partly inspired her forthcoming special holiday collaboration with Chopard. Mariah has a long-term relationship with the luxury Swiss jeweler, which has been adorning her for decades. (“They've always been so generous,” she says, “even in times when people weren't like, ‘Oh, Mariah Carey, la, la, la, la,’” — by which she means the post-Glitter, pre-Emancipation era.)
Mariah has several original Christmas songs to her name, including a quieter cowriting credit on the moving ballad “Where Are You Christmas?” which was recorded by Faith Hill for the soundtrack of the 2000 live-action adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, starring Jim Carrey as the titular Grinch. Mariah recalls thinking up the song's bridge, which transforms melancholy into triumph, in the car en route to work with the late composer James Horner — shortly after getting off the phone with Aretha Franklin. I can't help asking what by now must be a well-worn question: Will there ever be a studio recording from Mimi herself? She's enthusiastic but hesitant. “Do I want to do it myself? Yes.” And yet, “it's Faith's song,” she says, respectfully. “She did it.” She asks what I think. There's no reason why two wonderful artists can't share a song, I suggest in a thinly veiled nudge.
By the time we spoke last week, we'd both been boosted — one of us very recently. “No one warned me, ‘Oh, by the way, it might take you out a little bit,’” she tells me, only a day removed from this holiday season's jab. Time is notoriously a nonfactor for Mariah, though in this case she would like to know about how long until she can expect to feel, as she puts it, “freaking fantastic.” Out of respect, I don't round down. A “solid 36 hours,” I tell the artist who altered the course of pop and hip-hop within my lifetime. (The CDC notes that most reported side effects from the booster shot are “mild to moderate.”) “Oh, Lord. I don't have that time,” she groans.
Aspen, Mariah and her twins' home for the holidays, awaits, but first there is the work. Earlier this month saw the release of her second Christmas special with Apple TV+, Mariah's Christmas: The Magic Continues, directed by pop video king Joseph Kahn. She's courting interviews like this one and glamming it up for the talk-show circuit. And it is work. “Getting dressed up is often quite painful,” she tells me. “I don't think that people who have never done it, whatever the gender, will understand or could understand.… It's really freaking hard. It's not easy, darling.” The dual-sided nature of holiday-ing — obligatory and festive at once — befits an honorific like Queen of Christmas, a title that, not unlike other noble distinctions, was bestowed rather than chosen. (“I'm just a person who likes Christmas,” she gently corrected The Hollywood Reporter in 2017.)
Right now, calling into the Lounge, I imagine a more relaxed yet professional air, something akin to what we'll see in the show she's been filming in the space, which she hopes to bring to streaming sometime soon. “No one's ever seen me like this,” she says, describing the vibe as “so unglam.” While she harbors no angst about her other oft-given label, diva — “I've been seen as a diva for so long, and that's not a problem,” she says. “Who cares?” — she expresses concern that “most women aren't seen as producers.” A window into the Lounge will be a window into Mariah's craft and direction. “I'm in there in pajamas most of the time and just singing, and it's just singing and writing and recording and creating.” Recently, she and Brandy invited each other into the vocal booth for an as-yet-undisclosed collaboration. (“She was like, ‘Mariah, I love you. I want to do this with you. Can we please do it?’ And I was like, ‘Please? Can we please do it? I'm asking you.’”) Working together like that, says Mariah, is an insight into the multitudes a single artist can hold. “The people have no idea,” says Mariah. “She's a mother. She's doing this and that. She is doing it all.”
Such insight must also come in no small measure from experience. There's the holidays, the concept, and then there's home; the latter is not without its own loving mixture of cozy pageantry. The one-horse open sleigh of “Jingle Bells” fame is a genuine tradition for her and the twins — “but it's not a one-horse open sleigh, it's a two-horse open sleigh” — and on December 24, Mariah cooks. The dish is special, inherited from her father, who passed in 2002 but left behind a recipe for linguine in clam sauce that, as Mariah writes in her best-selling 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, reminds her of the Sundays she spent with him growing up. “He told me the secret was the minced onions. They literally liquefy in the pan.” It's a poignant ritual that, like Christmas itself, happens only once a year. And for that, it's all the more precious.
