3-CD Deluxe Boxset Elvis Presley: The Searcher (The Original Soundtrack) includes the 18 essential Elvis Presley hits, powerful performances, and rare alternative versions of songs at the musical core of the groundbreaking three-hour two-part film which focuses on the development of Elvis’ spellbinding artistry, from his early blues and country roots and influences through his seismic contributions to popular culture to his 1976 recording sessions at the Jungle Room in Graceland. The two-part documentary film uses rare footage lensed throughout Elvis’ life and career as a means of exploring Elvis’ singular musical vision in all its complexity. The 3CD deluxe box set features 37 additional Elvis cuts plus a special disc featuring selections from Mike McCready’s (Pearl Jam) original score for “Elvis Presley: The Searcher”; Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performing “Wooden Heart”; and the music that inspired Elvis (including R&B and country classics and “Home Sweet Home” sung by his mother, Gladys Presley). The Elvis Presley: The Searcher (The Original Soundtrack) deluxe 3CD set includes a 40-page hardcover book featuring rare photography, liner notes by Warren Zanes, and a director’s note by Thom Zimny. In his package notes for Elvis Presley: The Searcher (The Original Soundtrack), director Thom Zimny writes, “the soundtrack was in my mind from the beginning. I wasn’t just making a film, I was thinking about the collection of recordings I would gather for a person who saw the film, who wanted to complete the experience, just as I always had. Thankfully, our friends at Sony gave me and the Searcher team the chance to create this collection. It’s been in my mind for years now. To me, this collection is part of the film.” “So, in this collection, one gets not a Greatest Hits package but a song-by-song, curated portrait of an artist,” writes Warren Zanes in the book featured in Elvis Presley: The Searcher (The Original Soundtrack [Deluxe Box Set]), “….an artist who very consistently and courageously gave himself to his performances, as if in the giving he might find some missing part of himself. The truth in his voice, in the end, was the sound of a searcher. Along the way, he built a catalogue as deep as any found in the broad and beautiful vistas of American music.” As Bruce Springsteen observes in the documentary, Elvis Presley belonged to a singular category of musicians in the pantheon. “You hear performers in the thrall of the beauty of invention, not knowing quite where they’re going to go, not knowing exactly what they’re doing,” Springsteen said. “Just discovering and doing it literally as the music is being played…. You’re out on the frontier and it’s a very pristine and exciting place to be.” “You know, God bless him,” said Tom Petty. “He was a light for all of us. We all owe him for going first into battle. He had no road map and he forged a path of what to do and what not to do. And we shouldn’t make the mistake of writing off a great artist because of all the clatter that came later. We should dwell in what he did that was so beautiful and everlasting, which was that great, great music.”
