Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
She was dubbed a "rock princess," but Lisa Marie Presley staked her own musical claim as a singer-songwriter, allowing her to express herself apart from -- but sometimes alongside -- her megastar father.
Presley, who died Thursday at 54, bore a heavy weight: The daughter of musical royalty, the face of the Elvis estate and fodder for tabloid gossip about her marriages.
There was no question music would be a centre point of her life, starting when she was a child singing for her father, the King with the unmistakable voice.
"He's always been a huge influence on me my whole life always. It's the first thing I ever heard," she told The Associated Press in 2012.
As the sole heir of Elvis' estate, her early life was defined by the Elvis brand and her role building that legacy with her mother Priscilla. That often meant Elvis fans put their own feelings about her father and his music onto her and Priscilla.
Charles Hughes, an author and director of the Lynne & Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College in Memphis, noted that Presley faced sexism and racism in the tabloids -- and among some Elvis fans -- throughout her life, especially surrounding her relationship to another icon, Michael Jackson.
"There are very few people I can think of who had to do what she did ... being the Presleys' daughter, but being Michael Jackson's ex-wife and being a mother and being in the public eye as long and as complicatedly as she was," said Hughes.
She was 35 and a mother when her debut album "To Whom It May Concern" came out in 2003. The music was in the vein of the rock-pop sound influenced by Sheryl Crow, her sultry alto over distorted guitars and raw dark lyrics that hinted at her past relationships.
"The daring thing about her music, the daring thing about her recording career, the daring thing about her was her willingness to speak her truth," said Joe Levy, editor at large at Billboard. "The songs on those first two records are more challenging, more daring, and more exciting for their lyrics than for their music."
The album was well-received and certified gold, even though she didn't play publicly very much, and it hit No. 5 on the Billboard 200 chart. Her first single "Lights Out" reached a No. 18 peak on Billboard's Adult Pop Airplay. Over her career, she sold 836,000 albums, while her songs have drawn 9.5 million official streams in the U.S., according to Luminate.
Hughes said he still regularly plays the "Lights Out" music video for his students when he teaches about Elvis.
"It is such a compelling and a complicated take on the legacy and on her role in it. It's not about him. I mean, it is, but it's really about her," said Hughes.
But doing press interviews in 2005 to promote her second album, "Now What," meant being subjected to an endless barrage of questions about Jackson and her third husband Nicolas Cage, rather than the music.
Author Steve Baltin, who interviewed her several times over her career, said within music circles Presley was able to be herself and be accepted for her own talent. During her career, she worked with Pink, T Bone Burnett, Linda Perry, Richard Hawley, Ed Harcourt and many more.
"She was very respected as a musician, and while everybody else saw her as Elvis' daughter, people in music loved her and they appreciated the fact that, one, she was talented, but two, she really supported music," said Baltin.
Her third album, "Storm & Grace," came out in 2012, after a period in which Presley had moved to England to work with British songwriters on what turned out to be a very American record. More bluesy and acoustic than her earlier records, the songs are full of melancholy and heartache.
On the song "Sticks and Stones," she addresses critics with scorching mimicry, singing "She's ain't just like her daddy/oh what a shame/She's got no talent of her own/it's just her name."
Baltin said Presley stopped trying to avoid the comparisons at that point in her career.
"That record, in particular, was the first time that she really started to accept who she was and accept all of her roots and how this played into her," said Baltin. "So I think it was the record that was most completely her because she wasn't trying to deny her past."
Songwriter and musician Clif Magness worked with Presley for about two years making the first record, saying she was excellent at writing "dark and quirky" lyrics. He said he rarely pried about who inspired which songs, but he recalled her writing a song about her dad called "Nobody Noticed It."
"It took about six months to get her to the point where she can be honest with herself and creative with her words and talk about her dad," he said. "So that was really special."
Presley's lyrics to "Lights Out" were written after she had come back from a visit to Graceland, said Magness, where her father and her grandparents are buried in the back lawn, along with extra space for other Presley family members. Years later, in 2020, her 27-year-old son Benjamin Keough was buried there as well.
"I noticed a space left/next to them there in Memphis/in the damn back lawn," she sings.
All roads lead back to Memphis for the Presleys and Lisa Marie will be interred there, too, something she foretold in her music decades ago.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.