Eric Carmen, singer who had a worldwide hit with the tear-stained power ballad All by Myself – obituary
Eric Carmen, the musician, who has died aged 74, was the writer and performer of the lachrymose power ballad All by Myself (1975), which became a karaoke standard for reluctant singletons around the world.
Carmen first found fame as frontman of the power pop group the Raspberries in the early 1970s, but All by Myself was his first solo hit single. Crooning the plaintive chorus – “Don’t wanna be all by myself anymore” – against a lush string backdrop, he succeeded in investing the overwrought arrangement with some apparently sincere feeling.
Arista Records had wanted the more up-tempo That’s Rock and Roll to be the first single from Carmen’s debut solo album – entitled simply Eric Carmen – but he convinced the label to release All by Myself instead. “A seven-and-a-half-minute piano ballad with one voice, two drummers and 40 strings was not a logical single, but it was the furthest thing from the Raspberries, which is what I wanted.”
Although as Carmen recalled, “at the testing centre in Dallas it scored a 97 per cent ‘absolutely will not be a hit under any circumstances’ ”, All by Myself (truncated to four and a half minutes for the single) chimed with the unlucky in love and reached No 1 in the US Cash Box chart, going on to sell more than a million copies.
The classically trained Carmen based the verse on the second movement of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor; he also drew heavily on the same composer’s second symphony for his follow-up single, the equally emotive Never Gonna Fall in Love Again.
His aim, he said, was to introduce his young fans to “beautiful melodies that they might not otherwise hear”, but these attempts at musical education by stealth cost him dear: having mistakenly assumed that the works were out of copyright, he ended up paying 12 per cent of the royalties on both singles to Rachmaninov’s estate.
All by Myself was covered to decent effect by Shirley Bassey and Celine Dion among others, but the song was a victim of its own success, becoming film and television drama’s favourite shorthand for evoking loneliness, and thereby ripe for use in comedies and parodies.
In the blackly comic film To Die For (1995), Nicole Kidman’s narcissistic sociopath played a cassette of the song as her husband’s body was lowered into the grave. And in 2001 the pyjama-clad, chain-smoking Renée Zellweger sang along to Jamie O’Neal’s cover version during the opening titles of Bridget Jones’s Diary, cementing All by Myself’s status as the favoured soundtrack for emotional wallowing by self-pitying sad-sacks.
Among Carmen’s numerous other hit singles was Hungry Eyes (1987), which memorably accompanied a montage of Patrick Swayze tutoring Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing. The song inevitably became ubiquitous in ads for McDonald’s and the like.
Eric Howard Carmen was born into a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 11 1949. Something of a prodigy as a pianist, from the age of 11 he “went through seven years of classical training in four years” at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
It was an album of the Hollyridge Strings playing songs by The Beatles that first got him interested in pop. He taught himself the guitar so that he could play in local bands, and spent hours analysing records by the Byrds and the Beach Boys, “trying to figure out why these certain combinations of instruments and echo and harmonies made the hair on your arms stand up”.
After studying at John Carroll University, he was lead singer and chief songwriter with the Raspberries from 1970. They were noted for the beauty of their harmonies, which allowed them to get away with some risqué lyrics: “If we sing this like choirboys… maybe we can slide this by radio,” Carmen reasoned while writing the suggestive Going All the Way. Although the song was banned by the BBC, the moral outrage helped propel it to sales of more than a million.
The Raspberries’ other hits included I Wanna Be with You, Let’s Pretend and the self-referential Overnight Sensation (with its refrain “Wanna hit record, yeah”). The group was never modish, defying the dominance of prog and glam rock to produce a sound that harked back to the glory days of The Beatles and the Who; nevertheless, its fans included John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, and Bruce Springsteen, who told Carmen: “You know, while I was writing The River all I listened to was Woody Guthrie and the Raspberries’ greatest hits.”
The group went their separate ways in 1975, reportedly after a fight in a car park, although they reunited for a tour in 2004. In the meantime Carmen enjoyed solo hits such as She Did It and Make Me Lose Control, co-wrote Almost Paradise for the film Footloose (1984), and toured with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band.
He released The Essential Eric Carmen, a 30-track retrospective, in 2014, by which time he was no longer capable of writing laments in the All By Myself mode: “One of the current problems I’ve had writing songs over the last year or two is that I’ve been remarkably happy, for me.”
After two marriages that ended in divorce, Eric Carmen married Amy Murphy, a television newscaster, in 2016. She survives him with the son and daughter of his second marriage.
Eric Carmen, born August 11 1949, died March 11 2024