Elvis Presley 'Elvis by the Presleys' album

On Tuesday, May 3rd, Sony BMG Strategic Marketing Group will release “ELVIS BY THE PRESLEYS,” a new double CD from the best selling artist of all time -Elvis Presley.

A cornerstone of an unprecedented, multi-pronged collaborative effort that also includes a television special of the same name, and a four hour mini series “ELVIS” – both set to air on CBS, a lavish new book from Crown Publishers, and in partnership with Elvis Presley Enterprises, “ELVIS BY THE PRESLEYS” is an exciting new chapter in the musical legacy of the King of Rock n Roll™.

This 2 CD set is an essential companion to the remarkable special Elvis By the Presleys. Using some of Elvis' best-loved and most emotionally affecting tunes, the collection charts all the romance and drama of life behind-the-scenes with Priscilla and Lisa Marie.

“The new CD set offers a look at the “King of Rock ‘n Roll”™ as experienced through the eyes and ears of the two people who knew him best, his wife and daughter,” says Joe DiMuro, Executive Vice President/General Manager of the Sony BMG Strategic Marketing Group. “As the longtime musical home of Elvis Presley, Sony BMG is thrilled to bring fans a collection of songs that left an indelible memory on Elvis’s immediate family and we’re proud to continue to expose this tremendous, legendary artist to new generations of fans.”

The double CD “ELVIS BY THE PRESLEYS” contains 32 tracks including number one hits “In The Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” and “Heartbreak Hotel,” legendary gems like “Trouble” and “Always On My Mind,” and the new classic “A Little Less Conversation” which put Elvis back on the charts more than 25 years after his death. The rarities disc includes previously unreleased private recordings and Elvis at work in the studio recording “Jailhouse Rock” and “Too Much Monkey Business”.

Elvis’s musical contributions are unsurpassed as he is the only artist to be inducted into all three of the music Halls of Fame, including Rock n’ Roll, Country and Gospel. He holds the record for most Top 10 pop singles (40), the most Gold and Platinum awards (148) and is the world’s best selling artist of all time, having sold more records than any other artist in history.

“ELVIS BY THE PRESLEYS” will be released by Sony BMG on May 3. The companion television special “Elvis by the Presleys,” will be broadcast May 13 and “ELVIS,” the four-hour mini-series will be broadcast May 8 and May 11; both shows are set to air on the CBS Television Network. The book, also titled “Elvis by the Presleys” will be in stores May 3.

Elvis By The Presleys- CD Liner Notes

No Elvis Presley disc can be just a compilation of hits. Each one is also a repository of our individual memories and desires, as well as a reminder of our collective pop cultural history and the cataclysmic changes the King set in motion with a swivel of his hips. But this collection is different. Previous albums were for us; this one is for him. Consider it a veritable soundtrack to Elvis’ behind-the-scenes life rather than just an audio companion to Elvis By The Presleys, arguably the most revealing and poignant video portrait we will ever see of the artist as husband, father and friend. We know all about the icon; we’re finally getting to appreciate the man, with the help of those who knew him best.

What has made Elvis By The Presleys an extraordinary multimedia event is the intimate involvement of former wife Priscilla and daughter Lisa Marie in everything: the May 2005 CBS television special, the deluxe DVD edition of the documentary, the accompanying coffee-table book and this two-CD set. Mother and daughter freely share their own stories and feelings on camera, and they allow us to enjoy home-movie footage until now seen only by family and friends. Many of the images are probably not that different than the Super-8 celluloid gathering dust in some old canister in your attic. Young lovers fool around on the beach or cavort in the snow; friends ride horses together on a ranch or race golf carts; a couple shows off glittering rings for the camera on the eve of their wedding day; a baby clings to her proud daddy’s chest. Except that an amazingly unguarded Elvis is in every frame -- as boyfriend, buddy, groom, father -- looking just for a little while like a downright regular guy.

Of course, we know that Elvis never would -- or could -- be any sort of regular guy. That’s what makes these rare down-to-earth clips of the Presleys at home and at play seem so touching. They feel like stolen moments, glimpses into a parallel existence that Elvis surely yearned for but that the relentless pressures and irresistible temptations of pop super-stardom rendered unreachable. These real-life vignettes, along with detailed reminiscences from Priscilla’s parents Ann and Paul Beaulieu, Elvis’ cousin Patsy Presley Geranen and longtime Memphis-Hollywood pal Jerry Schilling, are far more riveting now than any further tabloid revelations about the latter-day King’s excesses. Not that anyone involved declines to acknowledge the more troubling, and ultimately tragic, aspects of Elvis’ final years -- or the profoundly surreal nature of living day-to-day with him. At one point, Lisa Marie confesses, “I just remember being in school and a car would randomly come to get me. I’d see a big stretch limo pull up and I knew that I was being summoned to come on the road with him.”

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Elvis By The Presleys is yet another heartening signal that contemporary interest in Elvis’ career has shifted away from the sensational sideshow and back to the musical main event. Almost 30 years after his sudden, untimely passing, yet another generation has discovered the undiminished vitality of his voice and has been inspired by his recordings. Elvis is no longer just a symbol of rock and roll’s rough-and-tumble beginnings, he’s become part of its constant evolution. Young, club-oriented record buyers helped to make an international hit of Dutch DJ JXL’s remix of “A Little Less Conversation,” which first popped up on an ingenious Nike World Cup TV ad and was then featured, appropriately enough, in the hipster Vegas caper movie, Oceans Eleven. (Superstar deejay Paul Oakenfold subsequently gave an equally cool dance-floor treatment to “Rubberneckin’.”) At the same time, far younger, cartoon-oriented listeners had started rocking along with Elvis via the Disney animated hit, Lilo & Stitch.

Lisa Marie herself was at the Lilo & Stitch age when she first sensed her father’s singular talent: “Seeing him come on the stage…it would blow my mind every time. I don’t think I ever wasn’t impacted like the rest of the audience when he would walk out. Even though I had just been with him backstage. You know, he’s so compelling and captivating, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.”

Priscilla concurs: “Elvis had this unique ability to sing a song…and it’s like he was singing that song to you. He could just win you over with that feeling: ‘Oh my God, he’s talking to me. I know he sees me in the audience, it’s for me.’”

With this collection, Elvis could indeed be singing directly to Priscilla. Tracks like “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” and “Welcome To My World” complement footage of their unusual transatlantic courtship. (When she first laid eyes on Elvis during his military stint in Germany, Priscilla, an Army brat herself, recalls: “He was breathtaking. I mean, he was truly much more handsome in life than on screen, which is hard to believe.”) “Hawaiian Wedding Song” evokes the best of times: footage of their top-secret nuptials. Conversely, early ‘70s numbers like “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” “It’s Over” and “Always On My Mind” underscore the worst: the emotionally devastating dissolution of their marriage five years later.

“Peace In The Valley” represents the gospel sound to which Elvis seemed to have the strongest personal connection beyond his trademark rock and roll (of which there is plenty here, including previously unreleased alternate takes of “Jailhouse Rock”). Elvis wasn’t a conventionally religious man, but, by all accounts, he always had a searching, spiritual side. Gospel was very much his comfort music, his own bridge over troubled water. Lisa Marie reveals, “He was on a never-ending spiritual quest of some sort…I never not saw him reading, looking, questioning.”

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Elvis once told a reporter, “I suppose the most important thing in a person’s life is happiness. Not worldly things…You can have cars, you can have money, you can have a fabulous home, you can have everything…if you’re not happy, what have you got? So I suppose if I can continue to make other people’s lives enjoyable and my own life happy, well, that’s all I can expect out of life.”

Elvis By The Presleys reveals a King made of flesh and blood, and that’s all good. This highly personalized history makes his meteoric rise seem that much more spectacular, his artistic triumphs that much more impressive, his career and personal missteps that much more understandable, his enduring popularity that much more inevitable. Listen after you’ve looked and you’ll find even more heart and sex and soul in these songs. This is an Elvis you’ll want to know a lot better.

“It’s lonely at the top, you hear that, it’s a cliché,” says Lisa Marie, reflecting on her dad. “But for him it was very true because I think he was one of the first people to actually get to a place like that…He was in such an ivory tower and so untouchable and so alienated after a while.”

There are probably lots of pathways to immortality, but the best is to have been all too human first.

-- Michael Hill

Notes On Disc Two

1. It Wouldn’t Be The Same Without You
One of the four known demos Elvis recorded with his own money before landing a contract with Sun Records. This is how everybody remembers young Elvis singing at school, at home, and around The Lauderdale courts. As Elvis once confessed, “I had never sung a fast song in my life” before recording “That’s All Right.”

2. Jailhouse Rock
One of the hippest white songwriter/producer teams of 1956 was Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. With dozens of successful R&B songs to their credit, they had somewhat reluctantly agreed to write and co-produce the bulk of the songs for Elvis Presley’s third movie. What they thought would be a spoiled white kid who just got lucky turned out to be an ambitious young man with as much knowledge about R&B as themselves, working hard for the right feel long after the producers would have called the take a master.

3. Anything That’s Part Of You
No other songwriter so consistently struck a chord with Elvis’ personal emotions as Don Robertson. After a session, Elvis invited Don up to his house to play his brand new recording of one of Don’s songs, and kept asking him questions regarding the lyrics, wanting to make sure that he fully understood the emotions of the song.

4. You’ll Be Gone
When Priscilla came to visit Elvis in the U.S. in the spring of 1962, Elvis proudly played her the new recordings he had just made in Nashville. One of these was YOU’LL BE GONE, a song that he had written himself with his good friends Red West and Charlie Hodge. To his deep frustration, Priscilla remarked that she liked his rock ‘n’ roll recordings better. Elvis had a fit, Priscilla was devastated, and Elvis never tried to write a song again.

5. Too Much Monkey Business
As much as hard work and determination were prominent at Elvis sessions, his sense of humor often took over. At this 1968 Nashville session, Elvis and country singer and guitarist extraordinaire Jerry Reed have fun developing an arrangement of this Chuck Berry classic. Knowing they are not yet at the final take, Elvis takes liberties with his vocal performance.

6. I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
Elvis had introduced this song at the Aloha From Hawaii show, but it was obviously a song he had known since its writer Hank Williams’ recording of it a couple decades earlier. This version was recorded at the home of Linda and Sam Thompson’s parents in Memphis in late 1973. Linda was Elvis’ girlfriend for several years, and brother Sam was quick to understand the significance of the moment. Thus, a microphone and tape recorder were hooked up to preserve it.

7. Baby What You Want Me To Do
Elvis’ fascination with R&B material was always obvious, and this particular Jimmy Reed song was introduced on Elvis’ other legendary TV special, the 1968 Comeback Special.

8. Blue Christmas
An RIAA-certified platinum single, and many times platinum on various albums, this song has sold more than 25 million copies in the U.S. alone. Such is its popularity that it transcended the holiday genre, and Elvis would happily perform it on request at all times of the year. This version was recorded in Norman, Oklahoma on March 26, 1977, on one of his last tours.

- Ernst Mikael Jørgensen

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Elvis Presley - Elvis by the Presleys