For the 50th anniversary of the king's marathon sessions at RCA Studio B a boxed set  called "From Elvis In Nashville" was released in November 2020. In the US it never charted higher than number 81, but in Germany it peaked at number 25 of the Sales Chart. This is quite surprising, because boxed sets of this kind are comparatively expensive and in this case no hits like "In The Ghetto" or "Jailhouse Rock" are included. Back in 2020 the streaming of music had already surpassed the physical sales and so the argument on prices was not relevant anymore. But in this case it has to be considered, that most of the Presley fans were older people, who still preferred to buy a physical product.

Today the album is available in 24 bit/90 khz flac. That means, if the platform of your choice supports high resolution audio, you can enjoy the tracks in the same quality Sony used to scan and master them. On Spotify, which has a market share of approximately 30% and is the only platform that publishes streaming figures, "From Elvis In Nashville" accumulates 17 million streams. Therefore the figure of the remixes is on a par with the ones of the original albums like "Elvis Country - I'm 10,000 Years Old" and "Love Letters From Elvis". Despite belonging to the greatest stuff the king recorded, the material from the summer of 1970 doesn't appear to be all that popular anymore.

The physical set includes four compact discs and a booklet of 28 pages with information regarding the sessions and the accordant record releases. The cover of the box features a photo of the king and his band. "From Elvis In Nashville" was produced by Ernst M. Jorgensen and Roger Semon, the same people, who were also responsible for the releases of Sony's own collector's label Follow That Dream Records. The mastering of the tapes was done by Vic Anesini at the Battery Studios in New York City, the mixes were provided by Matt Ross-Spang, who worked at Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis.

And that's the reason to listen to the material: The mixes! Instead of presenting the well known masters, it was decided to remix everything from the scratch. Matt Ross-Spang simply left out most of the stuff that Felton Jarvis had added back in 1970, so the new tracks don't feature all these voices, strings and horns we know from the original releases. Matt also put the focus on instruments like the organ or the bass and brought Elvis' voice more to the fore. The results simply sound stunning!

Of course I am aware of the fact, that Elvis never would have apporved a release like this. The voices, the violins and the horns were part of his concept and he wanted the songs to sound exactly like they did on his records. But of course that doesn't keep me from loving these mixes and even prefering some of them to the original releases.

The first two compact disc feature the master takes, the other two discs are filled with outtakes. Most of them have previously been released by Follow That Dream Records, but here everything has been remixed and by 2020 Sony even allowed the fans to hear Elvis saying things like "fucking" and "goddamn". In the past these dirty words had been edited out in order to save hypersensitive fans from heart attacks.

For reviews of the individual compact discs tap here:

CD 1 (master takes)    CD 2 (master takes)    CD 3 (outtakes)    CD 4 (outtakes)