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It wasn't the scheduled Halloween release date that prompted Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Poe to title her new album Haunted. It was the lingering ghost of her father, documentary filmmaker Tad Danielewski, who passed away in January of 1993 but contributes to the album from the great beyond through the wonders of sampling.
Poe was able to include her father on Haunted after discovering a personal treasure chest filled with cassettes containing his voice. But listening to them the first time proved so difficult that she was hesitant to open the Pandora's Box. "I took these tapes home and I couldn't listen to them," Poe explains. "It was too hard, so I kept finding ways to avoid it. They were sitting on my coffee table next to a boombox."
Once she eventually succumbed to the temptation of the tapes, she could not stop listening to them. As she anticipated, the cassettes brought forth a tidal wave of emotions in her. "Listening to these tapes was just an amazing process of understanding him, my relationship to him, my relationship to his death and his life outside of being my parent," she says.
Sitting in a downtown Los Angeles loft during a particularly hot August day, the lanky Poe examines openly what these cassettes mean to her. In her candor she admits that hearing his voice again also triggered self-doubts that stem from their relationship. Like Alvie Singh at the end of Woody Allen's Annie Hall, Poe chose to use her art as a way to rewrite history, rather than just relive it. "I got this little girl, this daughter of a friend of mine, to come in and create these kind of remembered conversations with my father," she says.
The CD closes with reconciliation between Poe and her father in the form of the beautiful flamenco-flavored, acoustic song "If You Were Here." It begins with an exchange between father and daughter that goes, "What is it, Annie?" "I miss you." (Annie is Poe's previously well-hidden real name). At the track's dramatic climax, Poe follows a sample of her father by fighting back tears as she says, "I love you." The little girl then pronounces, "It's OK, you can go now," followed by a brief swell of dramatic orchestration. It's a tearjerker moment.
"If You Were Here" was one of four songs from the new album Poe performed at a recent in-store at Border's Books & Music in Westwood, Calif. There is a special significance to Poe making the appearance at a store whose title contains the words books and music. Earlier this year, Poe's brother, Mark Z. Danielewski, released the critically acclaimed novel House of Leaves. Some have called the album a companion to the novel, though it's more accurate to say Haunted and House of Leaves hold a similar sensibility based on Poe and her brother's shared history. Danielewski joined Poe at the Borders stop, which is part of a larger tour the two are doing together where they take turns reading and singing.
Near the end of the hour-long set, which contained a lot of talk of their father and their past, Danielewski quipped, "I know there's been a lot of melancholy talk here, but there's a lot of sex, drugs and rock & roll in the middle of the book and the album."
Indeed, as easy as it is to get lost in the gripping story of the lost tapes of Poe's father and the family history explored in Haunted, that is only one aspect of the remarkable album. It is a diverse, sonically challenging record that fully delivers on the promise of Poe's gold debut, Hello. While there is plenty of sentimentality on Haunted, fans of Poe's first hit, "Angry Johnny," will also find an abundance of the provocative and alluring sexuality that characterized that song's chorus of "I wanna blow you...away."
Haunted is rich with enticing hooks and memorable beats, as evidenced on the seductive title track (which also appears over the ending credits in Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2), the in-your-face "Control," the repetitious beat of "Walk the Walk," and the sexy, dance rhythms of "Not a Virgin Anymore."
But the most impressive aural achievement for Poe and co-producer Olle Romo (a disciple of Mutt Lange as well as former Eurythmics drummer) is the multi-layered "Wild," a nearly eight-minute, guitar-heavy, psychedelic opus that Poe says is the culmination of something she has always wanted to do. "'Wild' is also the thing I'm most excited about doing live because 'Wild' is the beginning, more than the end, of an idea I've always had, which is to do a show where you bring in all these different cultures of music. You start a song, there's a pretty guitar part, and a vocal, and you go through a song that's very song-like, and then end up turning the place into a rave for six minutes. I think that is just awesome to deconstruct your own songs into remixes within the context of the same show," she says.
That she is thinking in terms of how the songs will come across on stage is a small victory; it means she is ready, to some extent, to let the album go into the world and be heard after two meticulous years of working on Haunted. "I realized early on that this record was going to tell me when it was done. It wasn't so much up to me. It was like this was my baby and it screamed and cried for certain things," she says.
Although she is excited about getting the album out, there is still some apprehension on her part, just because it is so close to her. For that reason, she vows to avoid looking at reviews, good or bad. But there is one person's opinion, other than Poe's, that is worth heeding. What would her father think of Haunted?
"That's so hard to answer," she answers after a moment's consideration. "I would hope in some way that he would be proud, but both these works are so personally connected to who he was, to his history, that I don't know . . . I did have a sense somehow that I had his blessing. And I do get a kick out of the idea that if any of these songs that had his voice in it were an actual single and I heard it on the radio, I would feel like I had accomplished the best thing possible. If I were driving down the street and I heard my dad blaring out of the radio -- 'It's a wonderful idea, it just doesn't work' -- I would veer off the road. It would be so cool."
STEVE BALTIN
(November 2, 2000)