Elvis
Music that sets Elvis's original voice and newly made voices side by side within a single story.
At a glance 🔭💭
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The filmmakers ⏳🌊
- ComposerElliott Wheeler
An Australian music director and longtime collaborator of Baz Luhrmann, he wove original recordings and new arrangements into a single soundtrack.
- DirectorBaz Luhrmann
A director known for flamboyant editing and for placing music in ways that leap across eras.
- LeadAustin Butler
Playing Elvis Presley, he sang many of the musical scenes live himself.
- LeadTom Hanks
Playing Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, he serves as the narrator of the entire story.
- ScreenplayCraig Pearce
Luhrmann's longtime screenwriting collaborator, who also co-wrote the screenplay for this film.
I. Putting on a new voice
(Work) “Elvis” is Baz Luhrmann's biopic recounting the life of Elvis Presley, the singer who heralded the birth of rock and roll, framed as the recollections of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Musically, its most striking feature is the way it sets Elvis's original recordings side by side with newly written songs within a single film. (Composer) Elliott Wheeler, the film's music director, is an Australian who has worked hand in glove with Luhrmann ever since “The Great Gatsby.” He came to this film less as a composer than as an arranger and producer — his job was to refresh Elvis's original songs, weave new tracks by contemporary pop artists in between them, and shape it all into a single soundtrack. (Challenge) His task was not a simple one. He had to bring back a voice already known the world over, and songs already fixed in memory, without letting them sound dated, and at the same time he could not erase the Black musical tradition — blues and gospel, rhythm and blues — that was the wellspring of that voice. (Method) The approach Wheeler chose was a compromise: blending the early-years songs sung by actor Austin Butler himself with Elvis's actual recordings within a single track, and entrusting hip-hop and pop artists with reinterpreting Elvis's songs. As a result, recordings from the 1950s and arrangements from the 2020s sit side by side on a single soundtrack album.
The film uses this song for the 1956 concert scene at Russwood Park in Memphis, and its melody returns throughout the story as a signal of his rebellious identity.
- A short, emphatic riff in the low register recurs throughout the film like a leitmotif (guiding motive) that stands for him.
- His way of declaring himself a dangerous man sounds as if he is throwing back, in his own voice, the social controversy his performances stirred up at the time.
- This passage features Austin Butler's live vocals, showcasing the real singing ability the actor spent years training.
II. The sound of Beale Street
(Roots) The film begins with the young Elvis absorbing gospel and blues into his very body in the Black neighborhoods of Memphis. This passage, in which a white boy soaks up both the songs of the Black church and the music of the Beale Street clubs, is presented as the root that would define all of his music to come. (Encounter) Here he crosses paths with real Black musicians, B.B. King among them. The film does not mythologize these encounters; it uses them as a device to show, without fuss, where his vocal style and his movements onstage came from. (Debut) The moment the first song he recorded at Sun Records hits the radio, music turns him, for the first time, from an individual into a phenomenon. The premise that a hum which burst out by chance in the cramped studio was recorded just as it was underscores that his music came not from calculation but from the body. (Reaction) The scene in which Parker, hearing the record, assumes the singer is Black, only to be told he is white, reveals briefly but unmistakably how the racial lines of the day divided music.
As a hum that burst out by chance in the Sun Records studio is captured on tape and becomes his first single, the song shows in music the very place where rock and roll as a genre was born.
- Setting a country-style vocal over a loose blues rhythm, the pairing lets us hear the moment when the line between Black and white music dissolves in his voice.
- Because the performance is framed as an impromptu studio jam, its unpolished rhythmic feel becomes, if anything, the scene's charm.
- The scene in which Parker, hearing the record for the first time, assumes the singer is Black reveals that the song's identity lay outside the racial categories of its day.
III. Don't shoot below the waist
(Contract) Once Colonel Parker becomes his manager, the local star becomes a national one. A contract with RCA and television appearances follow, and his songs are arranged more and more in the language of ever bigger stages. (Uproar) His hip-swiveling onstage becomes a target of broadcast regulators and public opinion. By showing how the same song can be read as something entirely different depending on the camera angle, the film reveals that music was a matter not only of sound but of the body and the gaze. (Reaction) Appearing in quick succession on The Milton Berle Show and The Steve Allen Show, he finds himself ever more at the center of controversy. Scenes in which each network applies different camera rules to the same song show how differently the gaze that framed the music operated, even more than the music itself. (Interruption) At the height of his fame he is drafted into the army. In this period of silence, the music withdraws from the screen for a while, and his very absence builds the tension for the next chapter.
Used for the controversial performance in which television cameras were barred from showing him below the waist, the song shows how the same performance could be controlled entirely differently depending on the medium.
- The song was first sung by the Black singer Big Mama Thornton; the film does not spell this out, but the arrangement of the soundtrack as a whole reflects a determination not to forget those roots.
- The fast shuffle rhythm and short, repeating guitar riffs are arranged to egg on his movements onstage, making it audible why the song became a target of broadcast regulation.
- The way the song is arranged ever more ferociously across different television stages shows, in music, that he was someone who pushed harder the more the controversy grew.
IV. The black leather jacket
(Hiatus) After his discharge he appears in Hollywood films and stays away from the stage for a long time. The songs of this period are treated within the film as shallow, commercial numbers, leaving the impression that his true voice was being stifled. (Offer) As time passes, he is given a television special once again. Parker wants a safe show filled with Christmas carols, but the production team and he himself choose otherwise. (Revival) The live performance he gives on a small stage, dressed in black leather, is a return to the way he first sang, that is, trading spontaneous phrases with the band while meeting their eyes. In this scene the music marks the moment he reclaims control for himself. (Statement) The special's final song expands one man's desperation into a social statement. The decision to sing it is portrayed as one of the few choices in his musical life that went against Parker's wishes.
The final song of the 1968 television special, this number expands personal desperation into a social statement and is portrayed as one of the few moments he chose for himself.
- Its melodic structure, starting low and gradually building, traces the very path by which emotion pushes upward from resignation to hope.
- An arrangement in which strings and chorus slowly thicken makes one man's plea sound as though it is gaining more and more voices.
- The song is known as one of his rare direct statements on the social upheaval of the time, and the film recasts it as a decision made against his manager's wishes.
- The scene is known for drawing praise for Butler's live vocals.
V. The lights of the International Hotel
(Settling in) The success of the comeback leads him to the stage of a big Las Vegas hotel. A lavish lineup with orchestra and backing chorus wraps his voice in a bigger, grander sound. (Cracks) But a contract requiring him to keep playing the same stage slowly ensnares him. The film stages his gradual exhaustion beneath the dazzling lights and the applause so that the volume of the music and the opulence of the arrangements stand, if anything, in contrast to it. (Song) The signature song of this period depicts the anxiety of a love going wrong, and the film leads us to hear it as a metaphor for his private life. The music quietly lets us know that the impassioned singing onstage and the burnout backstage are happening at the same time. (Shackles) Night after night, on the same stage, to the same applause, he slowly loses his life beyond it. The paradox that the more lavish the arrangement, the smaller the individual trapped inside it sounds, governs the music of this chapter.
This love song, sung on the Las Vegas stage, is placed so that it echoes his own life, signaling that dazzling performance and personal exhaustion are unfolding in the same moment.
- An arrangement that repeatedly lets the same melody swell and then subside mid-song renders in sound the frustration of being unable to escape a relationship.
- Wrapped in a lush orchestra and backing chorus, this performance makes his voice bigger, yet it also sounds as though it buries him in splendor.
- One of his best-known late songs, it is widely remembered as the song that defines his Las Vegas years.
VI. The last encore
(Repetition) Year after year, the Las Vegas stage locks him inside the same frame. Repetition takes the place of novelty, and the music begins to sound less like his life than like a schedule Parker has drawn up. (Confession) The film exposes the gap between the words he offers the audience from the stage in this period and the songs themselves. The fatigue and loneliness hidden behind the dazzling performances sound louder in the silences between the lines than in the lyrics. (Retrospect) Told from Colonel Parker's point of view, the story hints at its close that what he has told us so far was not the whole of it. Here the music is used not to supply an answer but to make the audience doubt, once more, the dazzling performances they have been listening to all along. (Finale) The old love song heard at the ending is a voice taken from a live recording of a June 1977 concert in Rapid City, two months before his death, and it erases the line between the newly made story and the actual record. In this moment the film passes quietly from an actor's performance to the living voice of the real man.
Used at the ending, this song is not an actor's performance but his own voice, preserved from a concert near the end of his life, and it quietly erases the line between the fashioned story and the actual record.
- Set over a piano accompaniment, the voice sounds rougher and more breathless than before, and by using it as is, unpolished, the film chooses the record left behind over a finished performance.
- Coinciding with the moment the screen cuts to actual archival footage, the music serves as a bridge that crosses from fiction into fact.
- The song is widely known as one of the concert films from the last stretch of his life, a scene fans have talked about for years.
Lesser-known stories
(Vocal blending) Many of the film's songs from his early years were made by mixing Austin Butler's actual live vocals with Elvis Presley's original recordings in a single track. Exactly where the two voices overlap and where they part has never been officially detailed, a choice the filmmakers reportedly made so as not to break the finished illusion. (Honoring the originator) Doja Cat's new song for the soundtrack draws its sampled fragments not from Elvis's “Hound Dog” but from the version by Big Mama Thornton, the Black singer who recorded the song first. It was a decision to leave, in one corner of the soundtrack, the roots of the music Elvis borrowed even while telling his story, and since the film itself never explains it, it is easy to miss unless you are paying attention. (Live training) Austin Butler is known to have undergone years of real vocal training for the role, and he himself has said in a number of published interviews that Elvis's distinctive manner of speaking and accent stayed with him for some time after filming.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Leitmotif (guiding motive)
(Meaning) Leitmotif means a “leading” (Leit) “motive” (motiv) in German. It refers to a short melody that stands for a particular character or emotion. (In film·musical scores) A technique in which a short melody returns each time the same character or situation reappears, so that the music alone lets you guess whose scene it is. It is much like a video game playing the same sound effect whenever a certain character appears. (Elsewhere) In literature the word is also used for a recurring symbol or motif.
Gospel (sacred song)
(Meaning) Gospel comes from the English word gospel, and it refers to a style of music in which Christian churches express their faith in song. (In film·musical scores) A tradition of Black church music marked by hand-clapping and call-and-response singing, often cited as a root of rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll vocal styles. You often find a structure like call-and-response round singing, in which one line is sung and another line answers it.
Rhythm and blues (R&B)
(In film·musical scores) A genre developed by Black American musicians in the 1940s–50s, adding danceable rhythms to the feeling of the blues. Rock 'n' roll is commonly described as having branched off from it. (Elsewhere) Today the term is also used for Black popular music in general with a more polished sound and slower tempos.
Sampling
(In film·musical scores) A technique of taking part of an existing recording and placing it in a new song. Think of it as editing sound the way a collage cuts out part of a photograph's background and pastes it in. (Elsewhere) In statistics and surveys, selecting a part of the whole for study is also called sampling.
Orchestration (orchestral arrangement)
(Meaning) The word comes from the idea of arranging a piece for an orchestra. (In film·musical scores) The work of deciding which instruments will play a melody, and when and how; the same tune can take on an entirely different mood depending on the scoring. It is much like a choir class dividing the same song among soprano·alto·bass.
Live recording (on-site recording)
(In film·musical scores) A method that captures the playing and voices of an actual performance as they are, rather than re-recording many times in a studio. It chooses to keep even the breath and wavering of the moment over singing perfectly as rehearsed. (Elsewhere) In broadcasting the term is also used for a live broadcast.