Larkin Poe
After winning a Grammy last year for Best Contemporary Blues Album with Blood Harmony, Larkin Poe — the dynamic rock duo of sisters Megan and Rebecca Lovell — decided to shake things up a bit on their seventh album Bloom. The record hits stores and digital platforms on Friday.
“In years past, we definitely approached writing in more of a split fashion, where we would come up with ideas independently and then bring them together,” guitarist and lead vocalist Rebecca tells the Scene during a call with the duo on a recent snowy day in Nashville. “For Bloom, we wanted to reinvent our writing process and come together and collaborate from the beginning to the end on every single song on the record. I think folks can really hear the leap forward in our writing due to that shift. … Additionally, we had our third collaborator: Tyler Bryant, who is also a longtime Nashville resident — my husband, our co-producer.”
Bloom is a sophisticated record, and as the title implies, it represents a flowering of sorts for the duo. Whereas most of their studio releases have been squarely in the blues-rock vein, the new album, which is sonically broader, might be best described as Southern rock.
“Our dad was playing a lot of Southern rock for us growing up,” says vocalist and lead guitarist Megan. “So we came up on a lot of the greats, and so much great guitar work and so much great slide work. Slide guitar has always been, in my mind, the epitome of guitar excellence, because it’s got guitar work, but it’s also got this human-emotion-vulnerability-like vocal quality to it — with the vibrato and the way that you can slide in and the pitch of it.”
While Larkin Poe has broadened their sound somewhat, the album still features the elements that propelled the duo to national prominence and beyond: Rebecca’s lead vocals full of soul and swagger and the sisters’ memorable monster guitar riffs and soaring solos. Megan’s thrilling slide work on the album reminds us why she’s called “Slide Queen.” She plays her signature Electro-Liege lap steel, which she designed with Paul Beard of Beard Guitars and can be seen playing in the video for “Bluephoria,” the album’s first single. Megan counts Duane Allman, Joe Walsh and Lowell George among her slide influences, but on Bloom she draws on another important influence.
“We were really inspired by David Lindley’s tone and kind of delved into that, specifically the Running on Empty tone,” she says, referencing the 1977 album by Jackson Browne.
Bloom was recorded in Nashville at The Lilypad, Rebecca and Bryant’s home studio. The sisters were accompanied by Tarka Layman on bass, Caleb Crosby on drums, Michael Webb on Hammond B3 organ and Eleonore Denig on strings. In addition to engineering the record, Bryant contributed some bass and guitar.
Larkin Poe
The sisters began their career as professional musicians in The Lovell Sisters, a bluegrass trio with their older sister Jessica. Those roots are slightly more apparent on Bloom than on their previous albums, and that’s by design.
“We removed a lot of the parameters for ourselves and let that come back in,” Megan explains. “There’s a lot of beautiful melodies, and that’s part of us; that’s a part of our lifeblood. So it’s really nice to let some of the folkiness back into our playing. It doesn’t have to be so hard or bluesy all the time. We can let that part of ourselves show, too.”
Lyrically, the record covers territory wide and deep. Sentiments range from “I may not be a star / But I know I can shine like the moon” and “Cool whippin’ like it’s Saturday night” to “The sun still rises after sorrow” and “If God is a woman, then the devil is, too.”
The record begins with “Mockingbird.” On the surface, the song may seem simple, but it showcases a deep respect for the many artists who preceded them.
“Every artist, we like to think that we’re special snowflakes, and we can have an original thought,” Rebecca observes. “But those humans who actually have an original thought are very few and very far between. The rest of us are standing on the shoulders of those that came before. We’re all derivative, and that shouldn’t cause shame. That’s just the nature of the human tradition of art. It’s passed from one hand to the next, down the generations, and there is something beautiful in that.”
The album concludes with “Bloom Again,” a song they wrote at the suggestion of The Dirty Knobs’ Mike Campbell, formerly the longtime lead guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
“He had suggested we write a song in the style of the Everly Brothers, and that’s actually the first song we wrote for the record,” Megan recalls. “When Rebecca and I sat down to begin, we were a little bit nervous. … ‘Bloom Again’ was like a gift. It came into being so easily, in just a matter of hours. It felt like a signpost for how the writing process was going to go for Bloom.”
