Some songs seem to belong completely to the time in which they were written. Others have a much longer and more surprising story. All by Myself is one of those rare songs whose roots reach back decades before pop music as we know it even existed. Its journey begins not in a recording studio in the 1970s or 1990s, but in the concert halls of early twentieth-century Russia, with one of the most famous composers and pianists of the Romantic tradition: Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Rachmaninoff wrote his Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18 at a particularly important moment in his life. After the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony in 1897, he went through a long creative crisis and composed very little for several years. Contemporary accounts describe how deeply the failure affected him. Eventually, after receiving treatment from physician Nikolai Dahl, Rachmaninoff slowly regained his confidence and began composing again. The Second Piano Concerto grew out of that recovery and was completed in 1901. It became one of his best-known works and, in many ways, a symbol of his return as a composer.
The concerto is full of the sweeping emotion that later became so closely associated with Rachmaninoff’s music, but the second movement, the Adagio sostenuto, has a particularly unforgettable quality. Its melody feels intimate, melancholic and strangely timeless. The piano and orchestra seem to move between loneliness and hope, creating an emotional atmosphere that could easily exist outside the classical concert hall. Decades later, that melody would do exactly that.
By the mid-1970s, American singer-songwriter Eric Carmen was starting a new chapter of his own career. He had already found success as the lead singer of the Raspberries, a band known for melodic power pop, but after the group broke up, Carmen began working as a solo artist. While writing material for his first solo album, he turned to a piece of music he admired: Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto.
The melody of the concerto’s second movement became the basis for the verses of All by Myself, released in 1975. Carmen did not simply reproduce the classical piece. He placed the Rachmaninoff-inspired melody inside a new pop song, added his own chorus and wrote lyrics about loneliness, independence and the uncomfortable realization that living alone is not always as easy as it once seemed.
That combination worked remarkably well. Rachmaninoff’s melody already carried a sense of longing, and Carmen’s lyrics gave that emotion a clear modern story. What had once been expressed by piano and orchestra was now expressed through the voice of someone looking back on his life and realizing that companionship matters more than he once thought.
There was also an unexpected legal twist. Carmen initially believed that Rachmaninoff’s music was in the public domain and could therefore be used freely. The situation turned out to be more complicated internationally, and the rights connected to Rachmaninoff’s work eventually had to be acknowledged. This is why modern credits for All by Myself list both Eric Carmen and Sergei Rachmaninoff as composers.
The song became one of Carmen’s biggest solo successes and firmly established him beyond his work with the Raspberries. More importantly, it showed how naturally a melody written for a classical concerto could survive inside a completely different musical world. The emotional DNA of Rachmaninoff’s work remained there, even though most listeners hearing the song on the radio probably had no idea where the melody had originally come from.
And then, two decades later, All by Myself began yet another life.
By the mid-1990s, Céline Dion had already developed into one of the biggest international voices in pop music. Her career had moved far beyond her French-language beginnings in Québec, and she had successfully established herself in the English-speaking music market. In 1996 she released Falling into You, an album that would become one of the defining releases of her career and eventually win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Her official discography describes it as a major milestone, and All by Myself was one of the songs chosen for the album.
Dion’s recording took Carmen’s already dramatic ballad and pushed it even further. Her version begins softly and almost cautiously, allowing the loneliness of the lyrics to come through before the arrangement gradually grows. When the orchestra and vocals finally reach their peak, the song becomes less like a simple pop ballad and more like a dramatic performance piece.
That transformation was perfectly suited to Dion’s voice. The song allowed her to move from quiet vulnerability to enormous vocal power within only a few minutes. One of the most memorable moments arrives near the final section, when she reaches the famous high note that has since become closely associated with her version. It is the sort of moment that can make audiences forget that the melody itself is nearly a century older than the recording they are hearing.
Her interpretation also gave the song a slightly different emotional character. Carmen’s original feels reflective and personal, almost like someone suddenly realizing the consequences of the choices he has made. Dion’s version feels bigger and more theatrical. Loneliness becomes something almost cinematic.
All by Myself consequently became one of the songs strongly associated with Dion’s 1990s career, and her official site notes that both this song and River Deep, Mountain High, another cover from Falling into You, became regular parts of her concerts.
That is what makes the history of All by Myself so fascinating. It is not really the story of one song, but of a melody travelling through different generations and different musical worlds.
It began with Sergei Rachmaninoff recovering from one of the darkest periods of his career and writing a piano concerto in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. More than seventy years later, Eric Carmen heard something in that melody that could express modern loneliness and transformed it into a pop ballad. Another twenty years passed, and Céline Dion turned that same song into one of the great vocal showcases of the 1990s.
The instruments changed. The audience changed. Even the meaning changed slightly with every version.
But the emotion survived.
And perhaps that is the real reason All by Myself still works so well today. Beneath the production, the huge vocals and the famous chorus is a melody that was already speaking about longing long before the words were ever written.
