In 1976, Elvis Presley recorded a song about a man who sits alone playing cards while his life empties around him. It is called “Solitaire.” Karen Carpenter had taken it into the American Top 20 the year before, and her version is beautiful — smooth, controlled, radio-perfect.
Elvis did something else entirely with it. He stripped it back and filled it with a heavy, quiet sadness that the song had never carried before.
Neil Sedaka and lyricist Phil Cody wrote the song, and Sedaka recorded it first on his 1972 album of the same name. The Carpenters picked it up for their 1975 LP Horizon and took it to number 17.
Elvis Presley – Solitaire
Where Elvis recorded it is the whole story. By 1976 it had become extremely difficult to get him into a recording studio at all. So RCA gave up trying and came to him — they parked a mobile recording truck in the back garden at Graceland and ran cables into his own living room, the carpeted den now known as the Jungle Room.
These became the Jungle Room sessions, held in February and October 1976, and they produced the last studio material of his life: From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee, and 1977’s Moody Blue.
Now read what the song is actually about—a man whose love has gone, sitting by himself, watching the days pass. Elvis was 41, divorced from Priscilla, in poor health, and recording in a house he rarely left.
Elvis Presley – Solitaire – Jungle Room Session
The lyricist has spoken about it since, and his reaction is more complicated than pure delight. Phil Cody told Songfacts it was “sort of weirdly histrionic” — but added that he was happy about it and that it won him an ASCAP country award. He also revealed something that makes the whole thing better: “It was a song that nobody at the publisher believed in.”
Commercially, it did little in his lifetime. It never made the Hot 100. It reached number 10 on the country chart as part of a double A-side released in 1979, two years after he died.
But fans keep coming back to it because of what it is. A song about isolation, recorded by a man alone in his own house, with the studio parked outside.