That great ending to Stella Hurt is most likely a nod to The Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." Certainly that's what it reminds me of.
Indeed, I'd suggest that this record shows off as well as any what's perhaps Elvis's essential, career-defining trick - that of being BOTH Lennon and McCartney at the same time.
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
You've got grinding, demented Lennonish tracks like 'Turpentine' and 'Stella Hurt,' and the kind eclectic, melodic pop McCartney specialized in during his best years ('Mr. Feathers,' 'Harry's Worth'), colliding frutifully together on the same record. The sentimental melodicism of 'My Three Sons' could, of course, belong to both. The check out the wonderful backing vocals on the coda of 'No Hiding Place' (ooo, oooo, oooo, oooo....AAAH!)! Straight out of
Abbey Road.
A track like "Go Away," with that organ, also wafts straight out of any number of records from about 1966, it seems to me.
This is such a surprising record, in my opinion, because it finds EC landing so HARD back on his home domain of 1960ish pop - it's as if he never left, as if he picked it up right from
Blood and Chocolate or
Trust: the urgency, the intensity, the imaginativeness and above all the
immediacy of it is simply classic middle-period Elvis, but with themes of the present (internet, old age) and with a voice deliciously thickened by time. Only Steve Nieve's keyboard parts sound deliberately nostalgic to me (and slightly disappointing as a result; sure, the *parts* are good, but the
sound is identical to
This Year's Model).
I also think that reports of EC writing most of the songs in a 2-week period leading up to the session might be revealing. The *older* songs he had - apparently, the co-authorships with Cash and Lynne - are actually two of the less successful tracks. I'd speculate that that's because Elvis works best when he simply blasts songs out and doesn't think too much about them, either as compositions or recordings. Hopefully he does more of this sort of "instant" stuff in future.
This is about an 8/10 on the Elvis meter. I'm really surprised by all the lukewarm responses earlier in this thread.