Brand New Year

Coming March 25, 2014 is "The Essential Eric Carmen" featuring 30 tracks
spanning Eric's musical career, remastered and sounding better than you have
ever heard them before. Plus, a special treat for Eric Carmen fans: a NEW song.
You heard that right. A NEW song from Eric Carmen! Titled "Brand New Year" and featuring both words AND music from Eric Carmen.

"When I wrote this song, I was thinking about two people, specifically, that I know, that had both experienced the most horrific year I could ever imagine.," admitted Eric in a post on the EricCarmen.com Forum. "They are two of the nicest people i have ever known, and yet, somehow, life dealt them both a terrible, terrible hand, last year. And then I began to consider the pain of my own four-and-a half year divorce, and how it has affected my children, and then I began to think about the countless millions of people in the world that had had a year at least that bad, or worse.

"When I write, my goal, as a songwriter, is to try to find what I call 'The Universal.' Something that resonates inside every human being. Something everyone has felt. And that is what makes a song great. When you can capture, in music and lyrics, something everyone has felt, at some point in their life. That is why 'All By Myself' is known in every, tiny corner of the world, and has been played seven or eight million times, worldwide, so far. Because everyone understands that emotion, everywhere. Not just in 1975, but in 1985, and 1995, and 2005, and, I suspect, in 2015, and beyond.

"I wanted the verses to be 'raw.' I wanted you to feel the pain I felt. The soaring falsetto of the chorus's and the bridge, is because those two parts of the song are where the lyric turns 'positive.' The verse was never supposed to feel 'positive.' It has a  sense of 'foreboding,' of having experienced the world...of having suffered. That's the whole point of the song. We all suffer losses, and injustices, and the pain that comes from experiencing life, but we can't, and don't give up. We hope for a better tomorrow. We somehow get through what life throws at us, and we go on, in spite of it.

"As a songwriter, sometimes, you just get lucky. The night I wrote the verses and the chorus of 'Brand New Year,' there was a snowstorm that caused a power outage on my street, that shut off every outside distraction. No heat, no phone, no internet, not even the faint hum of electricity I can normally hear. My living room was a complete vacuum, with nothing but a roaring fire in the fireplace, casting a beautiful glow across the room. I sat there, reading a book, by flashlight, and, at some point, I glanced across the room at the piano, and I walked across the room and sat down, and put my fingers on the keys. I hadn't done that for a long, long time, but, that night, the music just spilled out of my head. I wrote the verse, 'b' section, and the chorus in less than an hour, and the bridge a couple of days later.

"The lyric and title came a few days after that, and I wrote the lyric for the bridge the day I recorded the demo. It's one of the most 'organic' songs I've ever written. Just like 'Boats Against The Current.' They both just kind of wrote themselves. I love when that happens!

Read Eric's first hand accounts of being back in the studio and his thoughts on the new compilation CD from Sony Legacy at THE INSIDE STORY on the EricCarmen.com Forum and post your own thoughts on his new song HERE.

And this is just the start. Stay tuned for more exciting news and much more to come in what will be a stellar time for Eric Carmen fans. Looks like 2014 is shaping up to be one helluva "Brand New Year!"

—EricCarmen.com