ELVIS PRESLEY – “Return To Sender”
At last an Elvis hit with some vim – “Return To Sender” isn’t necessarily a better song than his other ’62 singles but his approach to it is spot on. He’s much more aggressive than usual, the staccato attacks on line endings (“Add-ress un-KNOWN”; “A lover’s SPAT!”) reflecting the frustration of the postal shut-out scenario. It’s an absurd scenario too, so the snarling Elvis is backed up by a breezy band performance, all brisk steps and cartoon honkings.
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Looking through the Popular list in celebration of the halfway point I’m surprised to see no comments for this song (tho I dimly recall some Great Technical Comment Conflagration around the time this was posted).
Quite simply, this is one of the top three Elvis songs ever recorded (the other two being “That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Little Sister”). Everything sounds just right – you get a real feel for the size of the room you’re in.
And the call-and-response backing vocals here evoke a lovely kind of companionship and buddy loyalty. I imagine a baffled Elvis coming back to his friends from the mailbox, exclaiming the words of this song to them – ranting, practically – so upset that they have to support his shoulders as they bring him into the sitting room. You’re right, they’re saying. It’s true. We agree with every word. What’s the world coming to? What’s wrong with her? She wrote upon it.
10.
Great comment Tracer – pre-2005 comments for this song were lost to the vagaries of Haloscan.
DESERT ISLAND DISCS WATCH:
Byrn Terfel, opera singer(2003).
I kind of view RTS as part of Elvis’ departure from Rock ‘n’ Raunch, to something much more wholesome and Middle-America. He’d been out of the Army for 2 years, so all that youthful vim & vigour had departed. His mother had passed, and I guess from a certain perspective, RTS represents that missing female influence. A hole that Priscilla struggled to fill.
All those Army boys in Germany faithfully writing away to their sweethearts, fruitlessly waiting for the Red Machine to march. Only their sweethearts had moved on, the letters returned unanswered. And so to the red light district to console themselves amid its dubious delights (perhaps a grotty little club, with some greasy Liverpudlians making a racket).
Of course, Elvis was long gone by then, only to be replaced by another phalanx of fresh-faced All-Americans, whose younger brothers would be bound for a god-forsaken jungle in South-East Asia. How many of THEIR letters home would go unanswered?
A couple of lovely comments there.
Re 4: Or could you see it as a last hurrah? His mother died while he was in the army and he’d made his last attempts at serious acting in ’61 with Flaming Star and (the rather good) Wild In The Country (Tuesday Weld as bad girl… good gosh). So the move away from Elvis Is Back’s wild diversity and sauce was well underway. With the exception of Devil In Disguise, pretty much everything he recorded in ’61, ’62 and ’63 was adult Nashville pop. Some great Don Robertson ballads, and Suspicion is one of his dozen greatest performances, but decidedly non raunchy.