Always On My Mind

On The Enduring Power of Complex Love Songs, Apologies, B-sides & Bodyguards

You can learn a lot about humanity through songs. I’ve been singing love songs every day for the past few weeks, rehearsing for a Valentine’s Day concert. All enduring classics, the kind you can turn inside out or upside down and they still work. Sturdy but slippery songs that everybody can relate to. I couldn’t help noticing the similar framework in some of them.

The astounding magic of ‘Always On My Mind’ , first made a hit in 1972 by Elvis Presley when he released it just a few weeks after separating from Priscilla, is its ability to let the listener wallow in either or both the satisfaction of hearing longed for words and inhabiting the voice of aching regret.

In an interview with the song’s main composer Wayne Carson, he describes calling his wife from Memphis to let her know he had to stay on there longer than expected, he’d already been away ten days. He explained ‘She was pretty damned irate about it, so I tried to calm her down’. As he started apologising, the song swooped down on him - he told her he had to go and then hung up on her while she was still talking, writing the majority of the song in the next ten minutes. Carson describes the moment of realisation ‘I said, “Well, I know I’ve been gone a lot, but I’ve been thinking about you all the time” and it just struck me like someone had hit me with a hammer’. I can’t help but wonder if hearing that song always pissed his wife off just a little, despite the riches it no doubt brought her.

He later laughingly described it as an apology song from all the men in the world to all the women in the world.

As told to ‘Nashville Songwriter: The Stories Behind Country Music’s Greatest Hits’ after adding the bridge part (‘Tell me, tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died’ with a couple of songwriter buddies on the fly at the request of Tips Smallman who was in the studio recording the original demo, Carson played it for big country producer/influencer Fred Foster, who just said ‘I don’t think the world’s ready for that’. Carson replied ‘You’re fucking kidding me!’. He was furious, and said he knew from the moment he wrote it, it was a monster hit song. His buddy reassured him that Foster would ‘rue the day’ he turned the song down.

The first recorded version of it is a swooning 1971 soul country rendition by Gwen McCrae, which Elvis uses as a vocal template. Apparently a bodyguard slipped the song to Elvis at a recording session a few weeks after his separation from Priscilla in 1972. It was released as a B side to ‘Separate Ways’ and steadily climbed its way into the charts becoming an enduring iconic Elvis heartbreaker. No doubt it struck very close to the bone for Priscilla; by her own account, Elvis refused to engage sexually with her after the birth of Lisa Marie, nine months after their wedding, leaving her desperately sad and unfulfilled and leading her into the arms of her karate instructor. Elvis’ bodyguard Sonny West wrote in his tell all book: ‘It didn’t come easy for Elvis to be a committed husband. Elvis viewed her as a mother first and a wife second, and he had hang-ups about making love with her.’ Sonny explained it was because of the special bond between Elvis and his mother Gladys; stating ‘The idea of sex with a mother was, to Elvis, out of the question.’ Sigmund Freud coined this ‘the Madonna-whore complex’ proclaiming ‘Where such men love, they have no desire; and where they desire, they cannot love.’

Ten years later, Willie Nelson released his own deeply sincere, stripped back version, and it went to number 1 in the charts, going on to be named Country Music Association's Song of the Year in 1982 and 1983.

The Pet Shop Boys put their own synthy spin on it and took it to the top of the charts again in 1987.

Talking about the song in a 1997 ‘The Tennessean’ article, Carson said ‘I like the kind that hang around, that come back and you say, “That's still a great song, and that's a great version.” People don't do versions of songs anymore. They're all hand-tooled for this guy, this producer, this sound and da, da, da. They're kind of one-time things’.

Dolly Parton wrote ‘I Will Always Love You’ as a last ditch attempt to break away from Porter Wagoner, who she had been appearing with as his ‘girl singer’ and duet partner on his long running variety TV show since the late 60s and she was desperate to set off on her own artistic journey. He didn’t want her to go and was making it very difficult for her. She says she was so emotional when she wrote it she was crying her eyes out. She also says she wrote ‘Jolene’ on the same day, which she’d forgotten until she discovered the little dictaphone cassette she sung them both into a few years ago.

She describes telling Porter to sit down and how then she just picked up a guitar and sang him the song, knowing that was the only way to express her complex thoughts clearly. He cried too and then said ‘That’s the best song you ever wrote. And you can go, if I can produce that song’. She agreed, they parted ways with his blessing and then he sued her for millions after she hit the charts with it. Dolly didn’t contest it and just paid him off, even before she was earning much, because she felt bad for him.

Elvis heard the song and fell hard for it, determined to record it. Dolly was even invited to the session, and was beside herself with excitement. But on her arrival at the studio, Colonel Tom told her she’d have to give half her publishing copyright to Elvis - that was the way they always did it. Dolly says ‘And I was really quiet … I said, “Well, now it’s already been a hit. I wrote it and I’ve already published it, and this is the stuff I’m leaving for my family when I’m dead and gone. That money goes in for stuff for my brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, so I can’t give up half the publishing” and he said “Well then, we can’t record it.”’ Dolly left and went home and cried herself to sleep. Priscilla Presley later told Dolly that Elvis sang ‘I Will Always Love You’ to her on the day they divorced. They held hands as they walked away from the divorce court.

She had a second hit with it in 1982 when she rerecorded it and sang it as Miss Mona, brothel madam of ‘one of the better known pleasure houses in all of Texas’, in The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas to Burt Reynold’s hot Sheriff Ed Earl when he asks to marry her. He doesn’t take her refusal seriously and just picks her up and carries her out to his pickup truck and drives off with her looking at him lovingly. Again, this monster hit was released as a B-side, ‘Do I Ever Cross Your Mind’ was the A-side.

In 1992, when they were looking for a big ballad for for the movie ‘The Bodyguard’, Kevin Costner suggested the song to Whitney Houston, playing her Linda Ronstadt’s version, which she loved. When producer/arranger David Foster called Dolly from the studio to let her know it was happening, she told him Linda’s version didn’t include the final verse, the spoken word one in Dolly’s original version, so she recited it to him over the phone and he jotted it down.

She didn’t hear anything more and thought it’d fallen by the wayside until she was driving her Cadillac back home to Brentwood from her office in Nashville and it came on the radio. At first she didn’t recognise it, even though it ‘caught her ear’ but as soon as she realised what it was, she had to pull over before she wrecked her car. She says in her book Songteller ‘I have never experienced a greater feeling in my life than hearing Whitney Houston sing that song for the first time’.

Stereogum said ‘Whitney Houston does things differently. Her version is pure unstoppable bombast. It’s meteors crashing and volcanoes erupting. It’s a thundering juggernaut, and it would be a thundering juggernaut even if the whole thing was just Whitney Houston’s voice’. It stayed at number 1 for an unheard of 14 weeks, won two Grammys and shot straight back to #3 on the charts after her death in 2012, the title is inscribed on her tombstone and they played the song at her funeral. Dolly said ‘After that, I thought, I bet they’ll play the same song when I go’. She’s probably right. She generally is.

She believes Elvis ‘would have killed it’ but after Whitney Houston's version became a number one hit, and eventually the best-selling single of all time by a female solo artist, Dolly claimed she ‘made enough money to buy Graceland’.

I did some research to try to work out exactly why the power of this love song remains so undiluted, much like Dolly herself, who likes to say ‘I’m as old as yesterday, but I’m as new as tomorrow’. I discovered the song is 66 beats per minute - other enduring huge hits with the same tempo include Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, Van Morrison’s Moondance and Fatboy Slim’s Praise You. A 20 year old English woman was jailed for a week in 1993, for endlessly blasting the song and refusing to turn the volume down. The song created another commotion when a neighbours ended up in a physical altercation after one threw the other’s stereo out a 4th floor window because she refused to stop playing the song.

Dolly says ‘if you got a good song it can be arranged or produced in any style’, which is proven beyond any doubt by the endless versions of both of the killer love songs we have dissected a little today. She also believes part of the song’s nebulous power it that it ‘says everything and nothing’. The secret of their success might just be that simple - give the people the words they want to hear.

Singing these songs a couple of times every day this past couple of weeks as my dad and I rehearse for our upcoming show, I have found they continue to grow in appeal and stature - these are towering songs - and the unadorned sincerity gets me in the heart every time - even if I’d like to be a little cynical about it, I find I can’t. Dolly says she has sung ‘I Will Always Love You’ at every concert she’s given since its release and she never tires of it. I’m sure Elvis would still be singing ‘Always On My Mind’ if he was still with us, and probably ‘I Will Always Love You’ too, after Colonel Parker was out of the picture.

Alright, hit me with your favourite love songs that will never die in the comments.

I hope that life will treat you kind and I hope that you find all you ever dream of … goodbye for now x

PS: If you’re in Sydney Australia this coming Valentine’s Day, join my dad Peter Head and I as we tell the stories behind and work our way through our own piano bar style versions of some of the world’s greatest love songs at Lazybones. Tix here. We promise to sing all the love songs you want to hear.