All by Myself

Eric Carmen didn’t sample Rachmaninoff so much as move in with him. The verse and chorus melody of “All by Myself” (1975) lifts, almost note for note, the second movement adagio of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – a piece Carmen had loved since childhood piano lessons and assumed, wrongly, had entered the public domain. It hadn’t; U.S. copyright still covered it, and Carmen ended up ceding a share of the song’s publishing to the Rachmaninoff estate, one of the more direct classical-to-pop royalty transfers on record.

What makes the borrowing work rather than read as theft is the fit between source and subject. Rachmaninoff’s theme is already a piece of grand, unresolved longing; Carmen’s lyric about a man facing down a solitary night doesn’t fight that mood, it just gives it words and a rock rhythm section, letting the concerto’s own emotional architecture do the heavy lifting a lesser song would have needed original melodic ideas to earn. The arrangement escalates the way the source material does – quiet piano into full orchestral surge – so the song’s key change into its final chorus feels less like a songwriting trick and more like the classical piece’s own dynamics finally breaking through the pop format containing them.

The result became one of the defining loneliness anthems of the decade, covered, sampled, and parodied for fifty years, largely because it never has to manufacture its own gravity – it borrowed gravity that was already sitting in a 1901 concert hall, waiting for a hook.

Greatest of All Time. A pop song honest enough to credit its source once the lawyers came calling, and better for it.

Hero image: “All by Myself” single artwork, Arista Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.