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Monday, April 5, 2010

For The Heart – A Lost Album

Reading a post about Elvis' greatest fool songs on the new blog The Mystery Train a couple of days ago made me remember an idea for an album me and my brother had in the 80's. Here's the story:

In the Danish fan club magazine The King, a competition was announced, where the idea was to come up with a new compilation album. If I remember correctly, the winning proposal would be presented to RCA's Danish branch with the hope that it would actually be released.

Me and my brother jumped at the opportunity: finally a chance to show the people in charge how it should be done! After some pondering, we came up with what we thought was a great concept titled For The Heart.

The idea was simple enough; to collect all the songs with the word "heart" in the title and present them in a chronological order. That way, we felt the listener could follow Elvis' career, from the early days at Sun to the last recordings made at Graceland in 1976, but with the help of lesser known songs (and some famous ones too). And there was just enough heart-songs to make up an LP:

Side A:
1.You're A Heartbreaker (Dec '54)
2. Heartbreak Hotel (Jan '56)
3. That's When Your Heartaches Begin (Jan '57)
4. Your Cheatin' Heart (Feb '58)
5. Wooden Heart (Apr '60)
6. Home Is Where The Heart Is (Oct '61)
7. One Broken Heart For Sale (Sept '62)

Side B:
1. Big Love Big Heartache (March '64)
2. One Track Heart (March '64)
3. Cross My Heart And Hope To Die (June '64)
4. My Heart Cries For You (Circa 1966, home recording)
5. I'll Hold You In My Heart (Jan '69)
6. Heart Of Rome (June '70)
7. For The Heart (Feb '76)

Looking back, not the worst collection of songs, although today two tracks from Roustabout seems a little on the heavy side. Not to mention "Cross My Heart And Hope To Die" not exactly being among the strongest material Elvis recorded.

Still, I remember me and my brother being pretty pleased, even including some sort of mock up of the cover. On the back, we put the titles of the songs inside small hearts, much like on the album C'mon Everybody, where balloons were used that way.

After mailing our draft to the staff at The King we waited hopefully, thinking we had a good chance with our For The Heart album. But week after week passed, and we never heard a word. Come to think of it, I wonder if a winner was ever announced in the magazine.

Me and my brother were greatly disappointed. Writing about our lost For The Heart album today was fun, though. I even came up with two bonus song: the movie version of "One Broken Heart For Sale" with the extra verse and the infamous rehearsal version of "Heart Of Rome."

3 comments:

Mårtenbrother said...

They never published anything! And the record that came out was something like Danish Hits, with a picture of Elvis from Girls Girls Girls on the cover. Boring.
Nice reading! And a funny compilation spanning Elvis entire carreer.

AnaTCB said...

Congratulations for your blog!

Thomas said...

AnaTCB: Thank you, I hope you'll continue to visit Elvis Today!