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For her first remake ever, Lisa Marie Presley covered a certain rock legend — but, surprisingly, one to whom she wasn’t related.
Instead, the lead single from her second album, 2005’s “Now What,” found Elvis Presley’s only child dipping into Don Henley’s catalog and smartly dusting off his 1982 hit “Dirty Laundry.” The media-bashing anthem took on an added bite from the woman who grew up under a public microscope, with a role-reversing Presley snarling, “We got our dirty little fingers in everybody’s pie/We love to cut you down to size.”
It was such a perfect song for Presley — who died suddenly at 54 on Thursday after going into cardiac arrest — to redo. It was almost as if Henley and partner Danny Kortchmar wrote it just for her.
But coming off of her 2003 debut “To Whom It May Concern” — a pop-rock set of all original tunes that, while going gold, failed to establish Presley as the musical heir to her dad’s throne — she probably could have made a king’s ransom simply by remaking one of her father’s classics. This was the make-or-break time when she needed a surefire hit — which her take on “Dirty Laundry wasn’t — and an Elvis cover would have been a no-brainer.
