On March 29, 1972, Elvis Presley walked into a recording studio in Hollywood and sang a song about a man apologizing to a woman he had taken for granted. It’s a song full of regret, a man admitting he should have held her more, told her more, treated her better, and asking her to believe that she was always on my mind.
He recorded it just weeks after his wife Priscilla had walked out of their marriage. And he sang it like a man reading his own life back to himself.
The separation had come in February 1972. By late March, Elvis was in RCA Studio C cutting new material, and what came out of those few days is remarkable. Two days earlier, on March 27, he recorded a song called “Separate Ways” — about a couple whose marriage is ending and who have to explain it to their little girl. Then on the 29th he recorded “Always on My Mind.” The two songs were released together on the same single.
Elvis had just taken the worst thing that had ever happened to him and put it on both sides of a record.
Elvis Presley Separate Ways
Here’s a detail almost nobody knows. “Separate Ways” was written by Red West — Elvis’s oldest friend, the boy who had stopped bullies from cutting his hair back at school in Memphis, and who had been by his side ever since.
So the song about Elvis’s divorce, which he sang into a microphone that week, had been written by a man who had known him since he was a teenager and had watched the whole thing unfold up close.
But “Always on My Mind” wasn’t written for Elvis at all. It came from a songwriter named Wayne Carson, and the story behind it is beautifully ordinary. In late 1971 he was stuck working in Memphis on a job that kept dragging on, and he rang his wife back home to say he’d be away even longer. She was, understandably, fed up. Trying to make it right, Carson said to her: “Well, I know I’ve been gone a lot, but I’ve been thinking about you all the time.”
Elvis Presley – Always On My Mind
He heard his own sentence, ended the call quickly, and went off to write it down. With Johnny Christopher and Mark James, he finished it into a song.
Carson always insisted the song wasn’t about anyone famous. His description of it is the best thing anyone has said about it. It was, he explained, “one long apology” — the kind of thing every man who has messed up would love to be able to phone his wife and say.
Elvis heard something in it that nobody could miss. Critics at the time noted the obvious: everyone in Memphis and Nashville assumed his marriage was why it sounded the way it did. It came out as the flip side of “Separate Ways,” and the single sold over a million copies. In Britain it went Top Ten.
Willie Nelson later made the song world famous with his own version in 1982. So did the Pet Shop Boys. But in 2013, ITV ran a national poll asking the British public to name their favorite Elvis Presley song of all time. Not “Suspicious Minds.” Not “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” “Always on My Mind” came first — the quiet, sad one he recorded in a studio in Hollywood, a few weeks after the woman he married at 21 packed her things and left.