Considering that the twin loves of my life are good books and great music (well, and cheese, too, but that hardly seems relevant here), the latest one from Chris Murphy, the elegantly and eloquently titled “The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe,” is right up my Straße, as they say in Berlin.
Chris confessed at a recent gig that he had the title way before the song was written to accompany it. Such a wonderful phrase, he felt, was too good a series of words not to be the name of the song, but I bet that such an approach to songwriting happens more often than you think.
But I agree with him wholeheartedly. Given the complexity of Poe’s, writing – its sweeping grandeur, its insights and tragic-romantic flair, its darkness and gothic melancholy – it is the perfect metaphor for the breakdown of the relationship that is central to the story, the complexities and machinations that went with it and even the description of the sounds and sights of the night as our narrator mulls things over.
Musically, like the four other songs on his latest EP, The Red Road, it is a spacious, raw, direct, and personal song, with just the violin sweeping and spiralling around this stark yet engaging narrative. Storytelling of the highest order.
Some people are happy to be labelled singer-songwriters; Chris taps into a much more established and exquisite tradition, that of the troubadour, in its oldest and most original sense of the meaning. Superb!
