This 1955 song is one of the best ever recorded

For many listeners, Elvis’s live versions of “Unchained Melody” are among the most moving things he ever committed to record — not despite the imperfections and the evident struggle, but partly because of them. He brought to the song a quality of lived experience that gave it a different dimension than Hatfield’s pristine studio performance. Both are extraordinary. They are extraordinary in different ways, and together they demonstrate how capacious the song truly is — how much emotional territory it can accommodate without straining at the seams.

The legacy of “Unchained Melody” today is secure in a way that very few pieces of popular music from any era can claim. It appears in films, in television programs, in advertisements, at memorial services, at weddings, at moments of private grief and private joy. It has been sung by opera singers, by country artists, by rock performers, by schoolchildren in auditoriums. It has been played on instruments ranging from solo piano to full orchestras. In each new context, it proves again what it has always been: a composition with an emotional core so stable and so finely made that it can carry whatever weight is placed upon it.

Alex North and Hy Zaret wrote it in 1955 for a film that almost no one remembers. What they created, in the process, was something that no one who hears it is likely to forget. Seventy years on, with over 670 covers recorded and millions of listeners still finding it for what feels to them like the very first time, “Unchained Melody” continues to do what the greatest music has always done: remind us what it feels like to be fully, achingly, irreducibly human.