after “Un cri”, a second unreleased title by Johnny Hallyday revealed

This new song unveiled on December 1 is an adaptation of “Love Me Tender” by Elvis Presley.

Two weeks after a first unreleased, The Screamsong written in 2017 and unveiled on November 16, a second unreleased title by Johnny Hallyday has been available since Friday December 1st. Engrave my heart can be discovered on Youtube and on streaming sites.

This unreleased title appears in the complete set of Johnny’s songs revisited in symphony and supervised by one of his former right-hand men, the star arranger Yvan Cassar, who worked with Vangelis and Charles Aznavour. The album was released on December 1 under the aegis of Universal, the historic record company of “the French’s favorite rocker”. This release will be followed by a resumption of the “Johnny Symphonique” tour in March and April 2024.

“A maturity, an abandonment”

Engrave my heart is a ballad, adaptation in French by Jean Fauque, famous lyricist who worked notably with Alain Bashung, of Elvis Presley’s standard Love me tender. The title had been rehearsed and put down on tape, originally, in anticipation of the Las Vegas show in 1996 and one of the resulting records, Destination Vegas. But “The idol of young people”, as he was nicknamed in his early days, did not choose this piece either for the live performance or for the album.

“As crazy as it sounds, it was on a rehearsal tape and it hadn’t been digitized. Johnny never told me about it, he must have forgotten it himself”, Yvan Cassar told AFP. However, the two men spoke for hours about this title of the “King”, founder for Johnny who had seen and heard it as a teenager in the cinema in the film of the same title, Love me tender, starring Elvis as actor, and singer. During the show in Las Vegas, Johnny will perform it in its original version, in English.

Johnny’s “breath”

After isolating the vocal track, Yvan Cassar set it with a new orchestration, while keeping the “breath” from Johnny. “We feel in this song his relationship to life, there is a maturity, an abandonment”notes the arranger.

A shout And Engrave my heart are not the first unpublished releases taken from limbo: The night with me And Two kinds of men had been published in 2020. According to a good expert on the file interviewed by AFP, “we are not immune to discovering other unreleased releases given the mass of recordings by the singer in his career”.