"I mean, it was songwriters like Holland-Dozier-Holland, Goffin and King, Burt Bacharach," he offers. "It didn't get any better.
"I wanted to find out what made 'Ticket to Ride' great," he says. "Was it the Rickenbacker guitar? John and Paul's voices? The EQ levels? What about 'Mr. Tambourine Man' by the Byrds? What made me smile about that music. I wanted to deconstruct those songs, to find where the magic was."
And while Carmen's solo career in the '70s and '80s was steady if not spectacular, no one was more surprised than him when the soundtrack to a 1987 dance movie set in the '60s that he had a tune on blew up big-time, leading to new interest in Carmen, his participation in a film-inspired concert/dancing tour and a video in heavy rotation on MTV.
"Let's face it, Dirty Dancing was not Gone with the Wind, but it obviously struck a nerve with people," he says. "I was reading a list that ranked the Top 20 best selling albums of all time, and it was No. 7 with 42 million copies. I mean, Sgt. Pepper was No. 14!"
Also on the list was Celine Dion's Falling Into You, featuring the French-Canadian chanteuse's cover of Carmen's most recognizable hit, "All By Myself." And the soundtrack to Footloose features Carmen again as co-writer of the film's love theme, "Almost Paradise," performed by Loverboy's Mike Reno and Heart's Ann Wilson.
But as our interview winds to a close, there is one question to Eric Carmen that begs and needs to be asked (and queried last, just in case we get hung up on it). Eric, what the hell were you thinking with the cover to 1980's Tonight You're Mine?
"HA!" Carmen laughs heartily. "Let me just tell you one thing. That girl and I were not in the same picture. We were never even in the same room! Some art director spliced us together to make that photo! I got so much flack for it. And I can tell you...we probably fired someone as a result!"
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