Chris Murphy – The Complete Works of Edgar Alan Poe (Chris Murphy Music)

Chris Murphy – The Complete Works of Edgar Alan Poe (Chris Murphy Music)

July 18, 2024

Considering that the two loves of my life are good books and great music (well, and cheese too, but that hardly seems relevant here), the latest from Chris Murphy, The elegant and eloquent title “The Complete Works of Edgar Alan Poe” is exactly my style, as they say in Berlin.

Chris confessed at a recent gig that he had the title long before the song was written. He felt that such a wonderful phrase was too good a string of words not to be the name of the song, but I bet that approach to songwriting is more common than you’d think.

But I agree with him completely. Given the complexity of PoeThe writing style of – its overwhelming grandeur, its insights and tragic-romantic flair, its gloom and gothic melancholy – is the perfect metaphor for the failure of the relationship at the heart of 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 ponders things.

Musically, like the four other songs on his latest EP, The Red Roadit is a sprawling, raw, direct and personal song, with only the violin circling and playing around this haunting yet captivating narrative. Storytelling at its finest.

Some people are happy to be called a singer-songwriter, but Chris is tapping into a much more established and exquisite tradition, that of the troubadour in its oldest and most primal sense. Brilliant!

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