8. Elvis PresleyS/T

I could’ve picked any album but I was six when I saw him on television in America, and he was doing ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, and I had an epiphany, at that age. Honest to god truth, I looked at him and I thought, oh, I’m going to do that. And he’s been with me my whole career. You have to listen to my one-woman show, but there have been nine or ten epiphanies that you can’t make up, where I’ve connected with him through the years. And the final one was the tribute song I wrote to him, called ‘Singing With Angels’. Most people know about it now; it’s played at funerals and done by Elvis imitators. I recorded it in Nashville with James Burton and the Jordanaires. It’s my tribute to him, you know. So it goes on. It just goes on.

This album was him at his purest, before he even got commercial, really. It was Elvis doing what he had heard on the black radio stations, and interpreting. And everybody was on fire. They were creating something, and that’s why I like that one the best. It wasn’t set in stone yet, what he was.

And I was so young when I saw him I didn’t think it through that much. I just knew that whatever he was doing, that was what I was going to do with my life. And that thought came back to me many times throughout the years.