There are two dominant images of Larkin Poe, neither of which tell you the whole story. In one light they’re the ballsy millennial blues rockers with a Grammy to their name, lap-steel shrieks in their records and T Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello and Mike Campbell in their corner. In another, they’re the sweet, southern sister duo who play classic covers on YouTube (from Aerosmith to The Beatles, Pink Floyd to Pat Benatar), smiling into each other’s eyes and harmonising as they’ve done since before they could read.
Now, through new album Bloom, we get a fuller picture of who Larkin Poe really are than ever before, evocative of the influences and life experiences that make them interesting. Riffy blues and southern rock on the one hand, hill country ballads on the other.
“We’re having a bit of a renaissance with this album,” singer/guitarist Rebecca says. “We’re allowing, I think, more of that feminine beauty and melodic energy to come to the fore. And that felt really good. Because there has been this sense, sometimes, of going : ‘Listen, clearly we’re having success being blues-rocky and singing about, you know, kickin’ ass and being badass and bulletproof and, like…”
“Characters,” says lap-steel-player/singer Megan, finishing the sentence. She’s the elder, more reserved of the pair, but with a quiet authority that her little sister patently respects.
“Exactly,” Rebecca says, “this braggadocious energy that has existed for us.”
Lovingly imbued with the sounds, places and people that formed them, Bloom is a rich tapestry of Americana, by turns jubilant and soul-searching. It’s rock’n’roll by sisters who cut their teeth on bluegrass. The work of two bookish tomboys from rural Georgia (their record label, Tricki-Woo, takes its name from James Herriott’s All Creatures Great And Small novels, which they read as children) who refined their sound by deconstructing their musical heroes. There’s grit and softness, history and energy that has carried into their adult lives, all of it imbued with that strange, subliminal connection unique to siblings.
“We were fairly isolated children,” Megan says. “We had each other and that was it. So we’ve been a package deal from the ground up. It has always been the two of us working on projects, going out and building forts, making roads.”
Larkin Poe are big proponents of the motto: ‘learn by doing’. Whether it’s sewing their own stage clothes, producing their own records or shooting YouTube videos from their sofa, they’ve become one of contemporary rock’s biggest DIY successes. A cottage industry, in essence, albeit one that headlines enormous theatres and appears on Jimmy Kimmel.
Covering classic songs is a core part of all this, not just a trick for online hits. While co-writing and producing Bloom with Tyler Bryant (Rebecca’s husband) at home in Nashville in early 2024, they listened to the likes of Blackberry Smoke, Sheryl Crow, The Black Crowes and Bonnie Raitt, sitting around the kitchen table, picking out riffs and other points of inspiration.
“Learning other people’s songs has taught us a lot about what we sound like,” Megan says, “because over and over we had to take somebody else’s song but make it sound like us. So it was a really good practice of ‘how can we still be Larkin Poe over a variety of different genres?’”
“We can crawl inside just about any process and figure it from the inside out,” Rebecca says. “That’s why we started our own record label, that’s why we started self-producing, why we both play guitars. We didn’t want to have somebody up on stage playing for us. We’re like, no, we’re going to do it our damned selves.”
When it comes to making records, this usually means nearly killing themselves by cramming the process between tours. For Bloom, though, they had some breathing space. Things would be different this time, they told themselves. They would take breaks. In the end they worked 26 days straight, leaving the home studio only to pick up their Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album for 2023’s Blood Harmony record, which Bryant also co-produced. It’s not that they’re martyrs. They just enjoy this creative homebody life, comfortable with each other’s input and not answerable to anyone else.
“We were having a really good time,” Megan says laughing, “and we just didn’t want to stop. [There was] a lot of frontman energy, but a surprising lack of ego. We all want the riffs to be very singable. We’re thinking a lot about the live show when we’re writing melodies – what is going to be really fun to sing with an audience.”
You can hear that all over Bloom. Bluephoria is a warm, slide-powered singalong. Black Crowes-esque boot stomper Easy Love Pt 1 evokes Rebecca and Tyler’s union to infectious effect. Nowhere Fast is all groovy southern boogie with a wicked streak. And it’s all shot through with the shared language of sisters, an ongoing, almost telepathic exchange that only the two of them understand.
“I am definitely the more verbose partner,” Rebecca muses. “I’m the one that does the majority of the talking on stage, but it is always speaking in a royal ‘we’. So often Megan and I will speak for each other. And interviewers don’t understand that anything I say, it’s been vetted by her. We are of a single mind by nature.”
“Or she’ll be able to read, like, if she’s going to a place where I’m not comfortable or something, and she’ll be able to divert,” Megan adds. “There’s a healthy amount of dysfunction in our relationship.”
Increasingly they seem to own that healthy dysfunction, wearing it like a comfortable jacket rather than a weapon. Tender, mid-paced banger Mockingbird finds them showing compassion for their younger years (‘like a mockingbird, singing a thousand songs that don’t belong to me, just to see who’s listening’), reflecting that search for self-acceptance we’re all on to some degree.
“I think in having conversations, when we first started the writing process, we were like: ‘Do we mean that?’” Rebecca muses. “‘What if these are the characters of Larkin Poe that we’ve built?’ Let’s tell people the truth with this record.”
So why not “tell the truth” until now? One reason could be to repel unwanted assumptions – specifically that soft tones and gentler sensibilities, in such a machismo-heavy sphere, could give the impression of sweet-natured ‘southern belles’ who need to be instructed, never mind that they’ve been in the music business most of their lives.
Bloom quietly counteracts such thinking (really through simple quality of songcraft), but it’s rock’n’roller Pearls that explicitly faces the casual sexism experienced by just about every woman in the industry at one stage or another. ‘I’ve been sweet,’ Rebecca sings, ‘I’ve been shy, I’ve been dumb but never impolite giving you the knife to cut me down to size/Go on, give me your advice… fighting back a scream, listening too hard, got the sweetest little heart, gonna blow it all apart… I don’t make demands, just shake my hand like you’d shake another man’s.’
“We kind of have baby faces,” Megan concedes, “even though we’re in our mid-thirties and we’ve been around the block several times. In a lot of ways we’re very accepting of people’s stories, or if people want to share their advice we accept it. There’s a lot of ‘teaching energy’ that comes from…” She pauses, considering her words. “Specifically a lot of older, more established artists. And that can be a little annoying at times, although sometimes you just take whatever you want from it.”
“I think so much of it is unconscious, too,” Rebecca adds. “And we are at this unique point in time where people’s awareness of gender identities, or the fact that you can’t just talk to women in a certain way…”
“Like, the amount of conversations we’ve had with well-intentioned fans,” Megan continues diplomatically, “like really well-intentioned older male fans, and how many people have told us: ‘Oh, you don’t get married, don’t have kids’, ‘Don’t do this, you should do this.’ It’s well intentioned, and it is unconscious. They’re not understanding the impact that they might be having.”
That fortitude is testament to their upbringing. Home-schooled on a farm in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, the Lovells had the sort of childhood seldom found outside Huckleberry Finn novels. They built forts in the woods. They ran around in coveralls and grubby T-shirts. They didn’t want to wash their hair. In place of watching TV they read stacks of books (they still do; Ian McEwan, Joan Didion and Stephen King are among their favourites), played banjos and helped their parents – their father a pathologist, their mother an occupational therapist – build a large portion of their house.
“We were laying concrete, building rod-iron, doing trim work, laying sidewalk, laying stone, laying brick, figuring out electrical stuff…” Rebecca recalls. “We were tomboys. And I have to say, hats off to our mother that she didn’t try to make us conform to any of her ideals.”
It was their mother, a keen pianist and singer, who they sang with first. They were harmonising at her side as infants. From there they joined church choirs, and ingested their father’s classic rock and heavy metal records. They studied classical instruments but ultimately formed acoustic bluegrass trio the Lovell Sisters, as teenagers, with their big sister Jessica.
It was a pivotal period. They learned to drive in a 15-seater van, bought with gig profits, and were schooled in the practical aspects of band life by Jessica, who was then 19, lead singer and the “grownup” in the group.
“She taught us everything we know,” Rebecca says. “Because we were children at the time, Megan and I were just screwing around, working on our instruments and songwriting in the back of the van, being kids. And she definitely paved the way and taught us, like: ‘Here’s the spreadsheet, and this is how much we’re making, this is how much it costs, and here’s all the Map Quest directions.’”
After five years Jessica got engaged, went to college and left the band amicably. Megan and Rebecca, conversely, weren’t done with music yet. They got back in the van and haven’t left since.
“She [Jessica] loves music, but she hasn’t played and or sang in quite some time,” Megan says. “But we’re working on her! Because when we do sing –and we don’t sing together that often, but when we sing you would be amazed – it just comes right back. We really would like to do something.”
ack in October 2023, Megan and Rebecca found themselves at a strange turning point. The Blood Harmony album had gone down extremely well. They were ripping through headline shows across Europe and the UK. Backstage at London’s Roundhouse, they were getting ready to play to a full house. Everything was going to plan. Yet they were incredibly unhappy.
“We felt so much pressure about having sold that many tickets,” Rebecca remembers. “The venue was so kind, they made such a big deal about it, and we were sitting back there drowning in imposter syndrome. I think moments like that caused Megan and I to have these conversations, like: ‘God, we don’t need to feel that way.’”
Accordingly, much of Bloom reads a little like mantras: steadying lessons to live by. Tedeschi Trucks-esque ballad Little Bit, in particular, stipulates guide posts for a ‘less is more’ approach (‘little dream, little plan, little rock’n’roll band’). It’s not an easy ask, in an age so driven by viral immediacy and public recognition. But they’re working on it.
“In my personal life it’s a work in progress,” Megan admits. “Being an artist, you can compare parts of your art that shouldn’t be quantified by numbers. You can compare your numbers on Spotify with somebody else’s, or your crowd size to somebody else’s. It can put you in a really weird frame of mind. I often find myself in that dangerous area of comparison. It’s just really, really…” She laughs shyly. “It’s not good.”
“But it’s the natural cheerleader in every human,” Rebecca suggests, “to go: ‘You’re going to do it better this time!’ or ‘If you girls could just have a radio hit, then you’d be a household name!’ And then me and Megan are like: ‘Wait, do we want to be a household name?’ We didn’t get into music to be public figures or celebrities. We got into music to be musicians.”
For now, their dreams reflect that mind-set. They fantasticise about a joint tour with their husbands (Rebecca’s is the aforementioned Tyler Bryant, who leads his band the Shakedown, Megan’s partner is Mike Seal, a revered guitar virtuoso on the Nashville circuit). They want to start families. They want to keep writing and performing. Less mass-market stardom, more small-batch artisanal empire, laced with that tenacious edge that’s taken them this far.
“Larkin Poe is our baby,” Rebecca concludes. “It’s been our life’s work. But we want to try to have kids and see how that works with being touring musicians. That’s going to be a lot to figure out. But I believe in our abilities. We can do hard things.”
Bloom is out now Tricki-Woo Records
