Song Information
"The Raven" features actor Leonard Whiting on lead vocals, with Alan Parsons performing vocals through an EMI vocoder. According to the album's liner notes, "The Raven" was the first rock song ever to feature a digital vocoder. A variant of this song appears on the Eric Woolfson album Edgar Allan Poe (2009), which contains the complete music from Woolfson's 2003 stage musical of the same name. The variant track does not appear on Woolfson's 2003 CD Poe: More Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which was a highly abridged version of the stage musical. On the variant, the bass line and keyboard chords of the original Tales of Mystery and Imagination track are heard, but they are quieter, do not feature a vocoder, and instead of an abridged version of the Poe poem being sung, the Woolfson version features a fuller spoken dramatic reading of the poem.
The Prelude section of "The Fall of the House of Usher", although uncredited, is inspired by the opera fragment "La chute de la maison Usher" by Claude Debussy which was composed between 1908 and 1917. "The Fall of the House of Usher" is an instrumental suite which runs 16 minutes plus and takes up most of Side 2 of the recording.
On "The Raven", notes from both "I Robot" and "Breakdown" from the I Robot album can be heard. "To One In Paradise" has musical similarities to "Siren Song" on Alan Parsons' 1993 solo debut Try Anything Once.
Read more about this topic: Tales Of Mystery And Imagination
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