The name Walter Afanasieff is not a household name, which I've recently learned is a shame. I had never heard his name until yesterday, but after typing it into the Internet, learning that he was important enough to merit a Wikipedia page (no photo, though, so ... ), and reading that he worked with an impressive list of artists, it became clear that I needed to know more. He spent the 1980s recording with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Lionel Richie, Whitney Houston, and Patti LaBelle. But as his discography reached the '90s, there's one name that routinely appears over and over again: Mariah Carey.