MC Lars Revisits His Dark Side On Expanded One Year Anniversary Edition Of “The Edgar Allen Poe LP”

Edgar Allan Poe was paid nine dollars for The Raven. Across his entire career, by the Poe Society of Baltimore‘s accounting, he earned roughly $6,200. In 2025, MC Lars raised $29,917 from 385 people to make an album about him. Poe would have found this either vindicating or infuriating. Probably both. He was like that. Today Oglio Records have released the One Year Anniversary Edition of The Edgar Allan Poe LP, one year after MC Lars delivered the record to his Kickstarter backers on Halloween 2025. The One Year Anniversary Edition expands the original twelve tracks with seven bonus recordings, including three new 2026 versions and four songs from the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe EP, among them the 2012 Dead Milkmen collaboration Mr. Raven and a 2026 update of that song featuring Chicago’s Gosh Diggity. Guests across the record include Jaret Reddick (Bowling for Soup), longtime MC Lars collaborator Watt White, Mega Ran, Rodney Anonymous, Schäffer the Darklord, Lacey Johnson, Ash Tell Em, Christina Rotondo and Worm Quartet. The record also enlists underground prank call legends Longmont Potion Castle and Brad Carter (Phone Losers of America). The One Year Anniversary Edition of the Edgar Allen Poe LP is now available here.

“I’ve been rapping about Poe since before I had any business doing it. The EP was a sketch. This is the actual building. A year ago I sent it to 385 people who paid for it before it existed, which is the most Poe thing imaginable, except he never got the money. I went and got a master’s degree to prove that teaching poetry through rap actually works, because I got tired of people calling it a gimmick. It turns out you can just measure it. I want a kid to hear this record, get obsessed with ‘The Raven,’ and not realize until later that they did their homework.” (MC Lars)