Lana Del Rey put her own spin on ‘Unchained Melody’ for NBC’s new Christmas at Graceland special.
The holiday special marks the first occasion that a live musical Christmas event has been broadcast from Elvis Presley‘s Memphis estate to celebrate the legacy of the late artist. Other a artists to grace the line-up include Post Malone, Kacey Musgraves, Alanis Morissette and John Legend.
While ‘Unchained Melody’, which Del Rey covered, was most famously performed by The Righteous Brothers and is particularly famous for appearing in the film Ghost, it does have a link with Presley. He himself covered it at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center in Rapid City, South Dakota in 1977, less than two months before he died at the age of 42.
Check out the performance below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrkrVy76suA
Last week, it was announced that Del Rey would be headlining Reading and Leeds in a UK festival exclusive. It will be her first time performing at the iconic twin-site festival and she will be performing on the Saturday of Reading and Sunday of Leeds.
The headline set follows her huge 2023 shows at Glastonbury and Hyde Park with a victory lap appearance for her latest album, ‘Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd’.
Meanwhile, Del Rey recently addressed the negative reviews and criticism she received during the early days of her career.
Speaking with Harper’s Bazaar., she looked back particularly at the response to her 2012 debut album ‘Born To Die’, which was described by many publications as being “inauthentic”.
“I think in one week, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Post and New York magazine agreed that it was the most ridiculous act that had ever come out,” Del Rey recalled in the discussion (via Music News).
“[But] it was 100 per cent authentic,” she added. “It’s just that where I was at the time was malleable in my own life – easy to, like, acquiesce … I kept rereading the idea of somebody who was feigning vulnerability. Perhaps what they saw was what was vulnerable.”