Ten years ago today, something happened on the British record charts that almost nobody saw coming. A brand new Elvis Presley album shot straight to the top. And in doing it, Elvis slipped past one of the biggest names in all of modern pop.
The album was “The Wonder of You: Elvis Presley with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,” and it came out on October 21, 2016.
The idea behind it was clever. Producers took Elvis’s real singing voice from his old recordings and built fresh music around it, played by a full orchestra. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is one of Britain’s finest, and they recorded the new arrangements at Abbey Road Studios in London, the same building where the Beatles made so many of their records. Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s former wife, served as executive producer, so she helped steer the whole project.
Priscilla had talked for years about the kind of music Elvis wished he’d done more of.
“Elvis always loved the great, operatic vocalists,” she said when the album was announced. “We often talked about his interest in recording material that allowed him to perform in that space… He would have loved these performances and I’m very happy that we were able to make this dream come true for Elvis and his fans.”
Watch the team explain how they wrapped a living, breathing orchestra around a voice that was recorded decades earlier.
Inside the studio: matching a live orchestra to Elvis’s old vocals
Now for the record.
When “The Wonder of You” landed at No. 1 in Britain, after selling 63,500 copies in its first week, it became Elvis’s 13th album to reach the top spot there. That nudged him one ahead of Madonna, who had 12. It made Elvis the solo artist with the most No. 1 albums in British chart history, the most of any solo artist at the time.
His very first UK No. 1 album had come a full 60 years before. Sixty years, and he was still knocking today’s pop stars off the summit.
The album went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Classical chart back home in America too.
When the chart news broke, Priscilla spoke again, and you could hear what it meant to her. “This achievement is something I know Elvis would have been so thankful for,” she said.
The song that gives the album its title is one of his warmest and most tender. Here it is with that new orchestra swelling behind him.
“The Wonder of You” set to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
There’s something moving about hearing that voice carried by strings he never got to stand in front of. Longtime fans got to line up for a new Elvis record all over again, and plenty of younger listeners met him for the first time through it. Ten years on, it still turns up on shelves and in headphones all over the world.