Elvis as you’ve never heard him: the playlist
Elvis Presley is synonymous with success. Everything related to the king of rock and roll manages to have an unexpected success, forty-nine years after his (premature) death. Four years ago Baz Luhrmann’s biopic “Elvis”, with Austin Butler as the voice of “Can’t help falling in love”, grossed a whopping $288.7 million at the box office: it had cost $85 million. Now it’s up to “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert“, another operation signed by Baz Luhrmann: arriving in cinemas worldwide on 27 February (and in Italy on 5 March) the film, which cost 10 million dollars, has already grossed double what was spent to make it, i.e. 22.5 million dollars. And it also happened for the soundtrack. The album reached the top of the official soundtrack charts in the United Kingdom and entered the top ten in the USA, placing itself in sixth place. The album collects 27 recordings featured in the filmincluding restored live performances, new remixes and medleys that rework some of the most famous classics from Presley’s repertoire. It will be available from April 24th as a double LP with two color variants (black and Translucent Orange and Yellow Amazon exclusive).
The project was born from a long work on the archive material of the performances of the Seventies: live recordings and vocal tracks were recovered and reworked to restore the energy of the original performances, combining them with new musical productions designed to reinterpret Elvis’ sound in a contemporary key.
Among the songs that anticipated the release of the soundtrack are “Oh Happy Day” and a medley built on four Presley classics – “Wearin’ That Loved On Look,” “Night Life,” “I, John” and “Let Yourself Go” – reworked into a new track designed to create “an entirely new song from Elvis’ DNA.” The musical work was developed by Luhrmann together with the film’s music producer, Jamieson Shaw, with the idea of imagining how Presley could continue to experiment with different sounds and genres.
The harvest then alternates restored historical performances and new reinterpretationskeeping Elvis’ vocal power and stage magnetism at the center. The result is a sonic journey that puts the original recordings in dialogue with a modern production, restoring all the strength of the live performances of the golden period of the seventies. This playlist retraces some of the most representative musical moments of the king of rock’s career: a mix of classics, remixes and medleys that bring to the fore the energy and musical freedom that made Elvis Presley one of the most influential figures in the history of rock and popular music.
