The day Edgar Allan Poe completely enchanted Stevie Nicks: “I just fell in love”
To all who know and adore her, Stevie Nicks is certainly no stranger to the mystic.
The ‘White Witch’ of rock ‘n’ roll has long been familiar with the occult, communing with spirits unknown through her poetry and fashioning performances that feel more like rituals than a traditional concert experience. Her presence conjures an intimacy that produces a relationship with her fanbase (dare I say, her coven) unlike any other, and such stems from a vulnerability that Nicks has proudly, defiantly maintained over her decades at the helm of the singer-songwriter canon.
While Nicks has immortalised her magic in her songbook, by the new millennium, she believed that her days of writing new music were over. She released Trouble in Shangri-La in 2001, a restorative album that saw Tom Petty motivate Nicks’ return to songwriting, after bouts of writer’s block. While subsequent touring with Fleetwood Mac ceased, Nicks remained still, quietly plotting her return to music.
This time, she found inspiration in an unlikely–though in hindsight, quite fitting–source: the Twilight saga. Explaining her inspirations during a red carpet interview, Nicks says that a trip to an Australian cinema to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon in 2009 prompted her to pick up her pen, once again.
“I wrote a song called ‘Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)’ about Bella and Edward,” Nicks recalls, “And when I finished the song, I got up and said to my assistant, ‘I’m ready to do a record now.’ And I hadn’t done a record in ten years, so this story changed my life.”
Building an album around ‘Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)’, she worked with her frequent collaborator Dave Stewart, growing comfortable again during studio sessions. Nicks wrote the resulting In Your Dreams, a gorgeous collection that hones her folk-tinged melodies in a way that sounds both revived and familiar.
Coinciding with the album’s vampiric inspirations is another nod to tragic love stories, heard in Nicks’ rendition of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘Annabel Lee’. Written in 1849, shortly before the American poet’s death, the poem laments the death of a beautiful young woman, a recurring theme in the Gothic writer’s work. Poe loves her so strongly that even the angels above become envious, taking her life. He is left dreaming of her nightly as he sleeps next to her tomb in their “kingdom by the sea”.
Nicks first came across the tale of ‘Annabel Lee’ in high school, when she first had the idea to set the poem to song. “I think it was required reading that you read Edgar Allan Poe, and I just fell in love with that poem,” she says in her documentary, Stevie Nicks: In Your Dreams.
Adding, “It’s like, who writes words like that, you know? ‘Can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee’… When I was 17, I read all his poems, and I just sat down with my guitar, and I started going in more of the ‘Landslide’ kind of [style]… very simple guitar song, and I just put it away for a future time.” Nicks made sure to stay faithful to Poe’s original lines, keeping her rendition as an authentic interpretation of his story.
She turns Poe’s mournful poem into a melodic ballad, as she brilliantly captures the sorrow in her voice, as though she could assume every ounce of pain. The melodies are almost optimistic, further capturing Annabel Lee’s likeness, in all of her beauty, in a way that only Nicks could. As Nicks sings lines like, “And the moon never beams / Without bringing me dreams / And the sun never shines / But I see the bright eyes / I lie down by the side… of my darling,” she does not grieve the loss of her beauty, but celebrates its short existence.
For Nicks to remain so enraptured with ‘Annabel Lee’, decades after her first encounter with it, is a beautiful testament to her abilities as a storyteller, envisioning a new life she could give to Poe’s story. It is the perfect inclusion to In Your Dreams, an album that signified a shift in Nicks’ songbook where she emerged in a new light.
