6 Songs Inspired by the Writing of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is one of our most enduring horror writers, with stories and poems which still chill and unsettle readers well over a century after his death. Poe’s work has been adapted countless times for film and television, but it’s also been explored in music, from retellings of his stories to poems set to music.

“Nevermore” by Queen

Poe’s famous poem “The Raven” inspired Queen’s track “Nevermore.” Although the two have little to do with each other, the song takes its title from the word repeated in the poem and uses it throughout the song. “Nevermore” is part of the second side of Queen II, consisting entirely of songs written by Freddie Mercury.

“Premature Burial” by Siouxsie and the Banshees

Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Premature Burial,” from their 1979 album Join Hands, was named after a Poe story exploring the fear of being buried alive. The song explores this in other ways. Siouxsie Sioux explained that it’s “an expression of claustrophobia, of being hemmed in both by society’s and people’s limitations.”

“Annabel Lee” by Stevie Nicks

A few artists have set Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee”—the final poem he wrote before his death—to music, but one of the most famous was Stevie Nicks. Although she wrote it when she was just 17, she didn’t release it until 2011, when she released the album In Your Dreams.

“Dream Within a Dream” by The Yardbirds

The Yardbirds turned Poe’s 1849 poem “A Dream Within a Dream” into a song—they adapted part of the first stanza and all of the second. The song also changes the order of some of the lines, with its opening lines instead serving as the final verse.

“Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Iron Maiden

For their second album, Killers, Iron Maiden reimagined Poe’s 1841 short story “Murders in the Rue Morgue” in their song of the same name. Like the story, the song is about the strange and gruesome murders of a mother and daughter in a Paris morgue, with one change—in the story, the killer is revealed to be an orangutang, while in the song, the narrator is the killer.

“The Raven” by The Alan Parsons Project

“The Raven” is just one song of many by The Alan Parsons Project inspired by Poe’s writing—the band’s entire debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, is based on it. “We wanted to instil the emotions that film-goers got from an Edgar Allan Poe story,” Parsons said in a 2019 interview.