From a family of Russian Jewish immigrants,[3] Carmen was born on August 11, 1949, in Cleveland, Ohio, United States,[4][5] and grew up in Lyndhurst, Ohio. He was involved with music since early childhood. By the age of two, he was entertaining his parents with impressions of Jimmy Durante and Johnnie Ray. By age three, he was in the Dalcroze Eurhythmics program at the Cleveland Institute of Music.[6] At six years old, he took violin lessons from his aunt Muriel Carmen, who was a violinist in the Cleveland Orchestra.[6] By age 11, he was playing piano and dreaming about writing his own songs. The arrival of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones altered his dream slightly. By the time he was a sophomore at Charles F. Brush High School, Carmen was playing piano and singing in rock bands including the Sounds of Silence.[6]
Though classically trained in piano, at age fifteen, Carmen started to take guitar lessons, but when his teacher's approach did not fit with what he wanted, he decided to teach himself. He bought a Beatles chord book and studied guitar for the next four months.[7]
Tenure with the Raspberries
Carmen became serious about being a musician while attending John Carroll University. He joined a band named Cyrus Erie, which recorded several commercially unsuccessful singles for Epic Records.[8] Cyrus Erie guitarist Wally Bryson had been playing with friends Jim Bonfanti and Dave Smalley in one of Cleveland's most popular bands, the Choir, which scored a minor national hit in 1967 with the single "It's Cold Outside".[9]
When Cyrus Erie and the Choir disbanded at the end of the 1960s, Carmen, Bryson, Bonfanti, and Smalley teamed up to form the Raspberries, a rock and roll band that was among the chief exponents of the early 1970s power pop style.[8] Carmen was the lead singer of the group, and wrote or co-wrote all their hit songs.[10] In 1975, after the breakup of the Raspberries, he started his solo career, de-emphasizing harder rock elements in favor of soft rock and power ballads.[8]
In 2004, Carmen, along with original Raspberries members Jim Bonfanti, Wally Bryson, and Dave Smalley, re-formed the band for a series of sold-out live performances in cities across the United States. On that tour, the Raspberries recorded a live album of their hits at the House of Blues on Sunset Strip, in West Hollywood. Both the show and album received critical acclaim.[11]
Carmen's second album, Boats Against the Current, was released in the summer of 1977 to mixed reviews.[15][16][17] It featured backup players such as Burton Cummings, Andrew Gold, Bruce Johnston and Nigel Olsson. The album spent 13 weeks on the Billboard album chart, peaking at number 45. It also produced the top 20 single "She Did It", but the title track only managed to scrape the bottom of the chart. The title track was later covered by Olivia Newton-John on her album Totally Hot. A third single taken from the album, "Marathon Man", became his first solo single not to hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart. However, Shaun Cassidy again made the top 10 in 1978 with Carmen's "Hey Deanie". For several weeks in the fall of 1977, Carmen had three compositions charting concurrently on the Billboard Hot 100; Cassidy's two big hits and Carmen's own "She Did It".[18]
Carmen followed up with two more albums. Despite declining chart fortunes, the single "Change of Heart" broke into the top 20,[5] and reached number 6 on the AC chart in late 1978, with this hit also being covered by Samantha Sang on her Emotion LP.[19] In 1980, he released the album Tonight You're Mine with its lead single "It Hurts Too Much" (number 75 Billboard Hot 100).[19]
In 1985, Carmen resurfaced on Geffen Records with a second self-titled album and a sizable comeback hit, "I Wanna Hear It from Your Lips".[8] The single hit the Adult Contemporary top 10 as well as the Pop top 40. The follow-up single, "I'm Through with Love", also climbed the Billboard Hot 100 and reached the top 20 of the Adult Contemporary chart. Another track from the album, "Maybe My Baby", later became a country hit for Louise Mandrell reaching number 8 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart. "I Wanna Hear It from Your Lips" was also covered by Mandrell, but only managed to peak at No. 35 on the same chart.[21]
In 1987, Carmen's contribution to the hit film Dirty Dancing, "Hungry Eyes", hit number 2 on the Adult Contemporary chart and also returned him to the Pop top 10.[5] "Reason to Try", a further contribution to the One Moment in Time compilation album of songs recorded for the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, kept Carmen's profile high in 1988, during which the nostalgic "Make Me Lose Control" also returned him to the number one position on the Adult Contemporary chart – where it stayed for three straight weeks – as well as number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100.[5] Following a final minor chart hit in 1988 with "Reason to Try", from an Olympics-themed compilation album,[22] Carmen's career was largely inactive for a decade.
The year 2000 saw the stateside release of I Was Born to Love You, which had been released in 1998 in Japan as Winter Dreams.[8] Carmen eschewed the use of a band on the recording, playing most of the instruments and programming the drum parts himself. The album did not find a large audience, but Carmen continued to enjoy success placing songs with other artists over the years. In 2000, he toured with Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band.[23]
On December 24, 2013, the first new recording in over 15 years by Carmen titled "Brand New Year" was released. The track, written and recorded in November and December 2013 in Ohio and Los Angeles, was issued as a free download by Legacy Recordings as a special "Christmas gift", to herald the March 2014 arrival of a 30-track career retrospective entitled The Essential Eric Carmen.[24]
Personal life
Carmen was married three times: to Marcy Hill from 1978 to 1979; to Susan Brown, with whom he had two children, from 1993 to 2009; and to former newscaster Amy Murphy from 2016 until his death in 2024.[25][26][27]
Carmen moved from Los Angeles back to Gates Mills[28] in northeast Ohio in the 1990s.
Following Carmen's death, his children Clayton and Kathryn filed a lawsuit against their step-mother, Amy Carmen, in Cuyahoga County Probate Court, accusing her of wrongly disinheriting them from a trust their father had established in 2007.[29] In response, Amy’s attorneys said in a court filing that Carmen had decided well before his death to drop his two children from the trust. In preceding years they had broken into his house, plotted to kill him and take his Jaguar, and had used his credit card without permission.[30]
Death
On March 11, 2024, Carmen's wife Amy announced that he had died in his sleep over the previous weekend at the age of 74. No cause or location of death was given.[31][32]
