Jason’s Metal Library: Xanadu

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To immediately get this out of the way, I want to state that this blog may have metal in the name, but we will discuss classic and progressive rock. As such, let’s begin by taking a look at “Kubla Khan” – a poem written in 1797 and published in 1816 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Coleridge’s preface to “Kubla Khan”, he notes that this poem was created after an opium-influenced dream after reading about the capital of the Yuan Dynasty, led by the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan. After waking from the dream, Coleridge went to work on writing the poem but was interrupted. Instead of completing a 200-300 lined epic, the interruption caused him to forget the lines he had planned, resulting in the 54-line poem we know today. The band Rush created a song based on this piece, called “Xanadu”. This 11-minute epic takes concepts from the story and it comes together as a grand merge of both literature and music.

Jason’s Metal Library: The Murders in the Rue Morgue

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Music often tells a story, whether it is directly through lyrics, hidden meanings, or through the composition and sounds of the instruments, there is always a story being told. Songwriting and fiction go together perfectly because of this. This basis is what will be assessed, seeing how musicians adapt the stories of authors to pay tribute and add on the compelling story being told. For our first analysis, let’s look at “The Murders in The Rue Morgue” – a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and a song by the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden. First written in 1841, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story captivated audiences, as it was one of the first modern stories written about a fictional detective which eventually inspired the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. C. Auguste Dupin is the French detective that is the narrator’s companion and main character of the short story. Dupin is not a professional, but his supreme intellect, imagination, and ability to put himself in the mind of the criminal are the talents that allow him to solve cases.