To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Merry Christmas, Carey has released a two-disc Deluxe Anniversary Edition. That a Christmas album was Carey’s laboratory for experimentation says everything about the intensity of her struggle for creative control early in her career.

At the time, her label saw her as a franchise and clipped her wings leading up to 1997’s Butterfly. Though constructed with a utilitarian hand to stand the test of time across demographics, Carey said the album gave her opportunity to dabble in areas her other albums hadn’t namely, gospel and overt retroism.

The result, 1994’s Merry Christmas, sounds as timeless as possible for music passed through the consciously innocuous filters of mid-’90s adult pop. In a method approach to recording, she kept a tree up for the majority of 1994 as she rifled through the Christmas canon, devising new arrangements for old classics, mashing-up secular with spiritual (a pop-house riff on “Joy to the World” was given a Three Dog Night injection), and writing three new songs alongside her longtime collaborator Walter Afanasieff. Once convinced, she threw herself into the process. Just a few years into her major-label career, it was too early, she thought, for such a legacy-artist flex. Carey said she initially balked when her future ex-husband/label boss Tommy Mottola presented her the idea of recording the Christmas album on which she’d eventually build her merry brand. And to think it all nearly didn’t happen.

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