Exhuming Elvis to Fill the Void

It was four in the morning and I was seated in the back of a cab, ankle-deep in my doldrums, when I remembered that the music of Elvis Presley existed, and suddenly everything was fine—for at least a little while. 

There’s a guy named Anthony Caleca who in 1989 was a producer for a news program hosted by Maury Povich called A Current Affair. Late one evening in December 2025 seated in the back room of a friend’s house, deep in discourse on the merits of Elvis, I misfired.

“There’s an Elvis version of I’m on Fire, right?” 

There could never have been an Elvis version of I’m on Fire, because by the time it first hit the airwaves in the mid-80s, Elvis was already extremely dead.

But there was something else. 

It could have been happenstance. But it could have been another thing entirely. I might have sent something hurtling back through the psychic mist — a salvo of firing synapses roughly in the shape of an idea.

And so maybe it was because of me that before I was born Mr. Caleca had already enlisted Mike Albert, a notable Elvis homunculus, for a segment which imagined what it would sound like if The King had covered songs written after his death — if he had covered Bruce Springsteen’s I’m on Fire. 

Whether Caleca and Albert really knew what they were doing when they created a facsimile of the original Bruce Springsteen music video, supplanting the Boss for Albert’s version of the great gyrator is hardly important. 

Because, yeah, this a goofy throwaway segment on a 35-year-old third-tier newsmagazine show. But what this goofy throwaway segment on a third-tier newsmagazine show from 35 years ago belies amounts to a common theological error; that the existence of an absence means that it must be filled. 

Maybe that can work– at least for a time. Maybe absence is merely a logistical problem, because what matters is the shape, not what it’s made up of. If we don’t look very closely, we won’t be able to tell that it’s not the real thing. We can’t have Elvis, but we can have “Elvis Product.” A simulacrum constructed of whatever we can find pressed into an outline of the original drawn from memory; it works so long as we get far enough away from the original that we can’t remember how it made us feel in the first place.

But what if instead absence is a substantive reality; one whose grooves and contours we can learn to safely navigate. Maybe the Elvis version of I’m on Fire is at its best when it does not exist. 

Because what if in 2009 when Celine Dion sang If I Can Dream on American Idol with the Elvis Hologram, that hologram sprang to life as a hard light projection, dropped its microphone and turned to Ms. Dion with a dissatisfied look. 

“Why, baby, have you brought me back?”

And what could she possibly say to him?