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Love Letters From Elvis

CD

Love Letters From Elvis
Rating:
3.6 / 5
Released: 1971/06 by BMG
With this release Elvis used the remaining songs of a great recording sessions which were used on three albums, "Elvis Country", "That's The way it Is" and this one. We won't say these were the "leftovers", but ...

ElvisNews review

Cover Art The cover art of this release is is one of the lesser of Elvis. It looks like The Colonel cut out three (good) live photos of his protégée and added the title on a white peace of cardboard. It does differ from the covers of other releases before and after this one on which we mainly find one full image of Elvis on the cover.  Content The eleven songs on this album were recorded in the same recording sessions (June 4 to 8 1970) as the tracks released on "Elvis Country" and tracks for the "That's The Way It Is" soundtrack. With this selection of songs Elvis shows his focus on ballads, the kind of material that fitted his voice at the time.  Listening to the songs you can hear him lifting even lesser songs like "When I'm Over You" and "I'll Never Know" to an higher level, pure with his performance and the quality of his voice. Next to the ballads on this album there also are two rockers, the Muddy Waters classic "I Got My Mojo Working", in a medley with "Keep Your Hands Off Of Her" and "I washed My Hands In Muddy Water" and the up-tempo 'Cindy Cindy".. The first is one of the most interesting songs on this release. It is an accidentally recorded pulverizing studio jam in which Elvis lays down his version of Muddy Waters veneration of the metaphysical macho-man.  A strange choice on this release is "Heart Of Rome", a weaker song of which the best "dirty" version ("I take a piss in every fountain") is released on the bootleg "Brightest Star on Sunset Boulevard". Besides the hit 'Love Letters", previously a hit for Kitty Lester, which reached the Top 10 all over the world, the single 'Life" was a strange attempt to set Darwinism to music ... but Elvis got away with it.  With this release Elvis used the remaining songs of a great recording sessions which were used on three albums, "Elvis Country", "That's The way it Is" and this one. We won't say these were the "leftovers", but this album cannot stand in line with the other two albums on which songs from these sessions were used.

Tracklisting


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Tina S wrote on July 06, 2005
last of the 70's good albums
Rating: 4 / 5
JimmyCool wrote on March 11, 2007
I like "This Is Our Dance"
Rating: 5 / 5
dbacke1 wrote on March 15, 2007
This is actually a pretty good album, with Elvis in fine form vocally. I particularly like "When I'm Over You", "I'll Never Know", and "If I were You", among others. I would have liked to have seen "I Got My Mojo Working" performed in concert! It would've been a good opening song. Of course, the weakness again that cannot be denied is that these were leftover songs from a long recording session that were thrown together to make an album, and the cover design is nothing to write home about either. You have probably seen a couple of my other comments regarding Elvis' albums in the '70s. I like the albums, but the undeniable truth is that they were not well produced or packaged, and there was not a lot of care put into them. Again, quantity over quality was the motto with Elvis' management, and it is a shame. I am working on putting together an article that deals with this subject in more detail, and hopefully it stirs a lot of discussion.
Rating: 4 / 5
Sandman wrote on February 01, 2010
Here it begins to go downhill. Leftovers from a marathon session in Nashville.
Rating: 2 / 5