Annabel Lee in The Song Remembers When

When I was younger, I loved the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. For whatever reason, those dreary stories about death, murder and the impending Hell seemed perfectly normal for my teenaged brain. Although, to be fair, the first Poe story I read was when I was 10 and I discovered The Fall of the House of Usher. I’m sure that seeems like a curious choice for someone so young, but I had just finished Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and afterward I tacked Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I tried to read as many of the classics as I possibly could before I reached high school so I would have less to do.

At the end of high school, I became fascinated with the poems of Poe, most especially the poem “Annabel Lee”. I had just lost Joe and the idea that death couldn’t separate us was appealing to me in obvious ways… but there are other themes that were obvious then but maybe not now. There are lots of lines about the angels being jealous of a love so strong. At that time, in my mind, I was condemned to Hell. Everything in it was very appealing and kind of an epitaph that was perfect.

10 years after Joe died, Stevie Nicks released In Your Dreams. On the album, she had set Annabel Lee to music and it was absolutely sublime. It was like a fresh catharsis after all those years. And it’s funny, even though she didn’t write it, it seems like she was born to sing the line “the moon never beams/without bringing me dreams”.

I absolutely adore this song, and I hope you do too.