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.
I know what you’re thinking right now. Upon hearing about Higher Than A Mountain: The Songs Of Andy Gibb, even I, who worshipped the late Andy Gibb as a child–straight-up poster-on-the-wall, scrapbook-keeping loved him–even I questioned the need for an entire tribute album. Not only did Andy release just three studio albums in his lifetime, he was unquestionably a singles artist, meaning those tracks were always the outright best songs on his full-lengths. I remember being actively disappointed by this fact after I’d spent several weeks of hard-earned allowance to buy his debut LP. So the question is unavoidable: are there enough great Gibb tracks to justify a cover compilation?