1997Released
3:50

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about My All. By Songfacts®.

In this Latin-influenced R&B ballad, Mariah Carey longs to recreate a night of passion with a distant lover. At the time, she was married to Sony Music executive Tommy Mottola, but the song isn't about him. With their marriage on the rocks, Mariah slipped away to Puerto Rico to meet up with her new love interest, New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. Although the singer insists they didn't consummate their relationship until after her divorce, the heat between them was so strong it sparked this steamy track. The baseball player also inspired the Butterfly tunes "Honey" and "The Roof."

Carey knew it was risky to write a song about her affair, but she couldn't the Puerto Rican rendezvous with Jeter out of her mind. "'My All' was the realest, boldest, most passionate love song I'd ever written," she recalled in her 2020 memoir, The Meaning Of Mariah Carey. "I brought to it the Spanish undertones, the warm breeze, the ecstasy of desire, and the agony of separation that I remembered so clearly." She added: "This song was about life and death, and I didn't want it to get lost in any over-the-top schmaltz. I needed it to be strong and simple. I wanted the vocals to be the centerpiece, the focal point in the mix, with a stripped-down track behind them. It was all about the emotion, the soul, and I sang it as if my life depended on it."

When Carey came home from Puerto Rico, she had the song's melody in her head. She brought it to her songwriting partner Walter Afanasieff, and the pair began fleshing out the rest of the track at Carey's in-home studio in upstate New York. He told Fred Bronson, author of The Billboard Book Of #1 Hits, about the songwriting session: "I remember being in the back part of the studio where my keyboards were set up and we were sitting there late at night, writing," he said. "There was a new keyboard that had come out, the Trinity, and I was strolling through some sounds and came upon a particular sound from a steel acoustic guitar. I played these really beautiful chord changes that eventually led to 'My All.' She started singing and I started playing and we came up with the basis of the song. I put a little drum groove down and it was one of the easier songs to write with her."

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of My All.
GKey
MinorMode
4/4Time Signature
108BPM

Album

The album My All is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released My All.
Columbia
(P) 1997 Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

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