After lengthy odyssey, Poe is ‘Haunted’ no more

Kirk Baird

Friday, Aug. 3, 2001 | 9:36 a.m.

Making "Haunted," Poe's latest album, was a difficult battle she waged over five years.

It's not because Poe, opening a sold-out show for Depeche Mode Wednesday at the Joint inside the Hard Rock Hotel, was bogged down in writing the music. Her Garbage-meets-Liz Phair-meets-Tori Amos style came easily enough, as she methodically assembled samples with her producer.

Nor were there problems with Poe's label, Atlantic Records, which was eager to capitalize on the success of her first album, "Hello," in '95.

The difficulty was much simpler: herself.

"There was a turning point for me when I came off the road after having been on the road for 2 1/2 years since my last album, and wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do first," Poe said recently from Portland, Ore. "There was all this pressure to capitalize on (my) fanbase, write the hits -- all this (expletive) you get after you've sold a few records for your first album. And I just remember I didn't feel all that motivated by all those kinds of things."

Poe began to look internally for the answers. She said she wanted to "figure some things out first" before working on her next project.

"It didn't take long until I realized that everything that was wrong in my life at that point was issues I never resolved with my dad," who died in 1993 of cancer. "And so quite naturally, as anyone would, I started to explore what that was."

Poe's psychological examination of her rocky relationship with her dad resulted in "Haunted."

Originally conceived as a note of acceptance and understanding to her father, in many ways the album is more for her; a self-therapy session to express a gamut of emotions she felt toward him -- sadness, anger, pity, fear, tolerance, love -- and her struggle to come to terms with them all.

In a twist worthy of her namesake, macabre author Edgar Allen Poe, it was the appearance of her father in a dream that helped the singer-songwriter exorcise her patriarchal demons.

"I dreamt he basically showed up in my life and he was alive," Poe said. "He said to me, 'I'm back because you're forgetting my voice.' "

Three weeks later while Poe and her brother were rummaging through some of their father's belongings in a storage facility, they discovered a box of cassette tapes he'd recorded that neither knew existed.

On the cassettes her father showed a kindness she'd rarely heard while he was alive, saying he loved her and was proud of her. Poe then sampled his voice for the album, to provide a dialogue with him she'd never really had while he was alive.

"It may be just a beautiful coincidence that I literally found his voice in a box of cassettes, but it makes sense in a way, even if it's purely psychological," she said. "I was thinking about my dad a lot."

The recording sessions were intense, she said, and as she neared completion on the album's final song, "If You Were Here," in which she says goodbye to her father, she found it difficult to let go.

"I sat in this room listening to ("If You Were Here") for two days and not doing anything," Poe said. "My co-producer, Olle, basically came in one day and said, 'What's wrong with you? It's beautiful. Finish it.' I had this one sample left of a little girl saying, 'It's OK; you can go now.' I started crying. I said, 'I can't finish this song, because when I do, I really have to let go."

With the pain of the strained relationship with her dad gone, Poe said she's in "a better and different place" now, and has already begun working on her next album.

She then added wryly: "But I don't think it'll take five years to put out, that's for sure."

Kirk Baird is an Accent feature writer. Reach him at 259-8801 or kirk@lasvegassun.com.