A biography for Eric Carmenhasn’t been written yet.
“I can make a record when I think I have a good one.”
“As luck would have it, my voice is best when it's kind of blown out.”
“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.”
“Most bands play one style of song. If you listen to Metallica it all sounds exactly like Metallica, and if you listen to Black Sabbath it all sounds like Black Sabbath. I like AC/DC a lot but you can pick those sounds out on the radio in a heartbeat because they all have certain things in common.”
“We didn't want to be tied to that damn teenybopper market. We tried to convince our record company that we could do more than silly AM hits, but they wouldn't listen.”
“I was known as a ballad singer who sang melodramatic heavily produced ballads. I'm not known as a mid-tempo singer who does fun songs. I'm not going to do a song like 'Dancing on the Ceiling.'”
“The Raspberries was formed as kind of a reaction to prog rock, which we didn't like. 'Let's bring some songwriting and harmonies back to music' And we did that.”
“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.”
“In Mexico they think I'm Mexican. In Italy they think I'm Italian.”
“It gets very lonely out on the road some times.”
“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.”
“The Raspberries had recorded some ballads on every one of our albums, but after 'Go All The Way' was successful Capital pretty much wanted to hear nothing but 'Go All The Way.'”
“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.”
“Around 1978, I got really, really sick of waking up in hotel rooms when I don't know where I am.”
“Writing is about bringing something from inside you that you're trying to say, and not just trying to say something to please someone else.”
“The Raspberries were together two years for one century. It was a very successful failure of a group.”
“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 always wrote ballads, and I always wrote rockers.”
“I wanted girls to scream at me. I wanted to be a rock star.”
“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?'”