Words matter. These are the best Eric Carmen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Soundtracks are made all the time that die horrible deaths – even soundtracks for popular movies.
Our aim was to be playable on both AM and FM radio – something no one had done in a while.
As a writer, I’ve always been the sum total of my influences, and those are all over the spectrum: Rachmaninov, the Who, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, Burt Bacharach and Leonard Bernstein, the Rolling Stones and the Small Faces.
I’ve had a great luxury in my career in that I became a very successful songwriter, which made it unnecessary for me to have to just consistently crank out albums and run off on tour for the sake of supporting myself.
I wanted to have a band that could rock as hard as the Who and sing like the Beatles and the Beach Boys; a band that could play concise, three-and-a-half minute songs with power and elegance.
Democratic foursomes don’t work in the ’70s like they did in the ’60s, when there were fewer musical directions.
So when I went to Arista, I had a period of writing where I suddenly was unrestricted. I wasn’t writing for a band for the first time. It opened up a whole other arena for me to work within.
I wanted girls to scream at me. I wanted to be a rock star.
It’s the duty of every generation to find music their parents hate.
It was not hip for people to like us, because their little sister liked us.
As luck would have it, my voice is best when it’s kind of blown out.
I noticed that on the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ record they could get away with racy lyrics like that because of how they looked and the melodic way they sang the suggestive stuff. They slid it by the censors.
I’ve always thought, since the beginning of my career, that it was better to take your time and write some good stuff and then go in and not be pushed or forced into just crankin’ stuff out, whether it was great or not.
When the second album came out, everybody gravitated immediately to the three and a half minute rock tunes and ignored the ballads. They thought all the Raspberries were was players of high-energy rock songs.
My song from ‘Footloose,’ ‘Almost Paradise,’ went number 1 dislodging Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ from that spot.
I’ve never been one of those ‘quantity’ guys. I’m not one of those guys who puts out a record every year whether it’s any good or not.
If you actually go back and listen to my first album, there are some things on there that are kind of rock ‘n’ roll.
There was nothing wrong with having teen-age fans, but we were hoping to appeal to a much broader audience than the 13-to 17-year-olds.
I remember our first interviews at the Capitol tower. These magazine people were asking us things like ‘What’s your favorite color?’ and ‘What do you like to do on a date?’ I’d ask, ‘Where are you from?’ and they’d say, ‘Fave’ or ‘Rave’ or whatever. We wondered, ‘When do the real writers get here?’
By the time 1997 had rolled around, I had been in the music business for all my life, from the age of 15. I started recording professionally when I was 18. I had seen how record companies work, how the business works, and truth be told, I was pretty disgusted by everything by that time.
It wasn’t until after Raspberries, Big Star and Badfinger came to exist that powerpop became a genre. In each case, I suspect Pete Ham, Alex Chilton and I all felt the same void after the Beatles broke up, and somehow we were all trying to fill it.
Around 1978, I got really, really sick of waking up in hotel rooms when I don’t know where I am.
