Elvis Country (I’m 10,000 Years Old)

Dock this album one star for the annoying snippets of Elvis singing “I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago” that fade in and out between the full-length songs. But those songs are often pretty great, from a pianoless version of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” to Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” to Sanford Clark’s “The Fool” to Eddy Arnold’s “I Really Don’t Want to Know.” The arrangements are sometimes slick enough that this isn’t that much more of a “country” album than his other work of the era, and Elvis stays Elvis, never putting any extra twang into his voice. But the lyrics have enough bite that it winds up one of his most passionate studio albums of the Seventies.