I've Lost You/The Next Step Is Love

Elvis Presley: I've Lost You and The Next Step Is Love

"I've Lost You" backed with "The Next Step Is Love" was released as a double-sided single by Elvis Presley on RCA Victor in July 1970, arriving at a moment of considerable artistic and commercial renewal for Presley following the triumphant comeback initiated by his 1968 NBC television special and the subsequent run of Las Vegas residency performances that had repositioned him as a dominant live entertainer. The single demonstrated that Presley's commercial instincts remained sharp even as his recording approach evolved toward a more mature, reflective aesthetic.

"I've Lost You" was written by Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard, a British songwriting team who had produced hits for artists including the Herd and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich during the late 1960s. The song brought a poignant quality to Presley's recording repertoire, addressing the slow dissolution of a relationship with a sophistication that distinguished it from the more formulaic romantic material that had characterized some of his mid-1960s output. The track was recorded at RCA's Studio B in Nashville during sessions in June 1970, with Felton Jarvis producing.

"I've Lost You" reached number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100, a solid if not spectacular performance that reflected the competitive singles market of 1970, when rock's album-orientation was beginning to shift commercial gravity away from individual singles. The B-side, "The Next Step Is Love," was written by Paul Evans and Paul Parnes and offered a more optimistic counterpart to the primary side's melancholy, demonstrating the traditional practice of pairing thematically contrasting material on double-sided singles to maximize radio and retail appeal.

The sessions that produced these tracks were part of an extraordinarily productive period in Presley's recording career. The June 1970 Nashville sessions also yielded material that would appear on the albums Elvis Country and Love Letters from Elvis, demonstrating the volume and variety of Presley's output during this renewed creative phase. Felton Jarvis, who had taken over producing duties from Chet Atkins and Bob Ferguson, developed a close working relationship with Presley that would continue through the early 1970s, creating an environment of mutual trust that contributed to the consistency and quality of Presley's recordings in this period.

The musicians assembled for these sessions represented the cream of Nashville's session community, the loose collective that later became known as the Nashville A-Team, including guitarist Chip Young, pianist David Briggs, bassist Norbert Putnam, and drummer Jerry Carrigan, among others. Their familiarity with each other and with the material allowed sessions to proceed quickly and productively, with Presley typically recording multiple takes of each song before settling on a preferred performance. The arrangements for "I've Lost You" in particular had a spacious, carefully considered quality that gave Presley's voice room to move without crowding the emotional content of the lyric.

In 1970, Elvis Presley occupied an unusual position in the pop landscape. The British Invasion acts that had temporarily displaced him from commercial dominance in the mid-1960s were themselves evolving toward album-oriented rock, and the singles market was shifting in ways that made sustained chart presence more difficult for artists whose primary appeal was not to the youth counterculture. Presley navigated this landscape with reasonable commercial success, producing several significant chart entries in 1970 and 1971 while continuing to dominate the Las Vegas entertainment market.

The pairing of "I've Lost You" with "The Next Step Is Love" on a single was a conventional industry strategy deployed to maximize the commercial return from a recording session, but in Presley's case it also reflected a deliberate effort by RCA and his management to demonstrate range and emotional versatility. The combination of a melancholy ballad about romantic loss with a more hopeful song about emotional recovery gave radio programmers material suited to different programming contexts and gave listeners a more complete picture of Presley's expressive range.

Both sides of the single have retained their standing in Presley's catalog as representative examples of his early-1970s recording aesthetic, a period characterized by a more mature emotional palette than the rockabilly and teen-pop of his early career without sacrificing the vocal authority and natural charisma that had always been his most fundamental artistic assets. The single was part of an album year in which Presley placed four albums on the Billboard charts simultaneously, a testament to the commercial energy of his post-comeback period, and "I've Lost You" contributed to a run of Hot 100 entries that confirmed his continued relevance in a rapidly changing market.