Revisionist History · Pushkin Industries

Encore: Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis

July 17, 2025·53 min·4 clips

Elvis changes 'stroked' to 'struck' in 'Old Shep,' transforming a song about moral redemption into one of morbid remorse.

It begins with a footnote. The narrator is reading a book he cannot remember when one stray reference points to a psychologist's strange paper about Elvis. That is enough to start the chase. The trail runs through versions where performance and repetition keep circling the same shaky musical passage. The bridge keeps coming back. At Battery Studios, the Sony guys play take after take, with names that sound comic at first and then start to feel harder to shrug off. The names are absurd. The narrator hears the same odd fracture again and again: Elvis slipping out of the lyric and into laughter across years. Then the numbers make it stranger. By 1982, a laughing version has become a UK radio hit, reaching number 25 on the British Singles chart. The joke has left the studio. It has a public life now. Jack White shifts the room. In Nashville, at Third Man Records, the narrator brings the song to a musician with an Elvis shrine in the hallway. Black, yellow, leather, taxidermy, a couch, and a guitar make the interview feel less like analysis and more like a listening session. White has played Elvis songs before, and his quick demonstration gives the mystery a musician's ear. The episode stays with the question: why does this laugh keep returning, and what broke through when it did?

As heard by us

A footnote becomes a curious tour through Elvis, recordings, and Jack White.

The episode begins with a footnote and uses it as a doorway into a wider search, moving from a strange paper about Elvis by Alan Elms to the people and recordings that keep the subject in motion.

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Why you'd press play

Follow one footnote into an Elvis paper, a live interview trail, and a question of voice, imitation, and performance.

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