In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
Eric Carmen, one of power-pop’s pioneers as the frontman for the Raspberries and a successful adult-contemporary solo artist, passed away over the weekend. He was 74 years old.
Carmen was forever a man out of time. Even as he accumulated hit records (did you know he cowrote the Footloose love theme “Almost Paradise”?), his music was scorned for being too wimpy, too poppy, too much not what was cool at the time. But time marched on, and people found themselves returning to the songs he wrote, because of their messages – what could be more direct than “I wanna be with you so bad”? – and the feelings they stirred up. Try as the critics did to shame him for his career, he had a lot to be proud of.
When it comes to covers of Eric Carmen songs, the veins are rich, but they’re tapped a lot more rarely than you might think. According to Secondhandsongs.com, the most-covered Raspberries song, “Go All the Way,” has fewer than a dozen versions. If anything good comes out of Carmen’s passing, maybe it’s that people will discover what a true artist he was. Here are five artists who have already made that discovery.
Nouvelle Vague is back with a new collection titled Should I Stay or Should I Go? I’m going to hesitate in answering that question, as there is the one more demanding, about how this lot are still going. No offense intended, mind; back in the day, Nouvelle Vague’s bossa nova revisiting of punk and new wave songs was really something to behold, with both the novelty and the application well worthy of praise and merit. But now? I know a version has been touring, but I hadn’t appreciated they were still marketing something new, or, more to the point, new to them. So, is this a soft sophisticated samba swirl through the song cycles of Eilish and Swift, Sheeran and whoever else the young people adore? Ummmm, nope. This is a further trawl through the hallowed dusty halls of the last century. Or, more to the point, hoping the audiences who loved them near two decades ago will still love them now, and are still listening to their tired old record collections.
(hangs head) How did I not hear of this? How did Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth, a slice of prime r’n’b/jazz–acid jazz if you must–slip under the Cover Me radar last year? Alerted by the end-of-year lists of others, a quick shufti confirmed this demanded our attention. And it comes with quite an impressive back story to boot.