An Interview with Larkin Poe
by Frank Matheis
One of the major breakout artists and most exciting acts in the acoustic blues today is the sister duo Larkin Poe, Rebecca and Megan Lovell. They achieved a great deal attention through YouTube and they are by now international touring stars, playing an amalgam of American roots music. While their latest albums have also showcased their original, roots-rock side, they are deeply grounded in the acoustic blues. thecountryblues.com had a chance to interview both sisters via telephone from Nashville, Tennessee on May 28, 2020, smack in the middle of the pandemic lockdown.
Larkin Poe are refreshingly energetic, musically passionate and equally articulate. In the interview, they spoke with heartfelt commitment to their music, responding with clear explanations and refreshing honesty. Beyond their considerable musical prowess, they are two sharp, powerful young women who know where they are headed. Great things will come from them as their stars ascend, not just because of their virtuosic instrumental skills and wonderful harmony singing, but because of the unbridled, infectious joy they bring to the music. They love what they do and the result is sheer happiness! No wonder everyone loves them so. The accolades could flow easily: ‘brilliant’, ‘amazing’, fit perfectly. Just what we need today!
The first thing we learned is that Megan and Rebecca are not twins, as many people including this writer assumed, as these young siblings look remarkably similar. They are, in fact, less than two years apart.
They were generous with their time and responses and do a great job telling their own story:
FM: I’m very interested in siblings playing together. Family music is in my mind the best. The harmonies are the most beautiful. When did you both start to play? And talk to me a little bit about the experience of playing with a sibling.
Megan: Our first introduction to music, to playing music, was classical violin lessons. Our mom wanted us to be able to experiment with playing violin. So, when Rebecca was three and I was four we started lessons. Also around that time our mom was teaching us how to sing harmony. She has a beautiful voice and she loved singing harmony with her siblings, so she actually sat us down at our family piano and taught us how to sing harmony with each other. So that was kind of our first introduction to playing and singing very young.
FM: By now you’re both multi-instrumentalists, correct?
Rebecca: I predominantly cover the acoustic and the electric guitars. I play some banjo on our records. We both play organ and synthesizers and bass. I am also a mandolin player – I don’t play mandolin very much with Larkin Poe anymore, but back in our bluegrass days as teenagers, mandolin was my main discipline. Megan is pretty much the lap steel guy through and through, which is really one of the biggest defining angles of our sound, I believe. We hold it down on quite a few instruments but definitely in a live show you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll see Megan playing the lap steel and I’ll be switching around on a multitude of acoustic and electric guitars.
FM: You would think that maybe you would be called the Lovell Sisters instead of Larkin Poe. Where does Larkin Poe come from?
Megan: Larkin Poe is the name of our great-great-great-great-grandfather, and we did want a band name that had some family ties, family connections with the sisters. We wanted to take his name on. Larkin Poe was actually a cousin of Edgar Allen Poe, so I like that connection as well – very distantly related, but we hope some of his genius and sort of dark writing style trickle down through the family tree.
FM: Earlier said, “In our bluegrass days.” Do you want to take me through the main progression since you got serious about music – even before you became professional – what kind of stages did you go through?
Rebecca: We started with classical music as little children, and that was definitely our parents’ vision – I think our mother and our father really wanted us to at least have music as a language that we could understand. I don’t think that either of our parents had ever anticipated us becoming professional musicians. But, we loved music as children, and in our early teens – I think I was 13, and Megan was 14 – some friends of our family took us to a bluegrass festival. As you can imagine in the southern United States during the summer particularly there are a lot of bluegrass festivals that you can attend on the weekends. We wound up at a bluegrass festival, and I believe that was really the point in time in which music became to shift for us – our interest in music began to shift. That’s when Megan and myself really delved in deeply with a love of roots American music and a real focus on musicianship – learning how to play our instruments and learning how to jam and to improvise and fooling around with the art of songwriting. From 13 years old to about 16 or 17, both Megan and I played bluegrass music with our eldest sister in a group called the Lovell Sisters. We were somewhat fortunate in that by a couple of turns of luck we wound up on national radio here in the U.S. on a talent competition – Garrison Keillor is a famous radio personality here in the U.S. and he for many years hosted a show called “Prairie Home Companion” that would air to five or six million listeners on a weekly basis. He hosted a talent competition that we appeared on – kind of by happenstance. We submitted a demo tape because we thought it could be fun and we wound up getting selected to perform on the show and we went on and we ended up winning. From a batch of contestants all across the U.S., it was myself and Megan and our eldest sister, Jessica, and we ended up winning as the Lovell Sisters. People heard us on the radio show and assumed that we were professionals when in fact it was a hobby for us. However, that turned into a run of shows across the country. We got asked to come and perform places, and we thought it was fun, so we did. That was our first introduction into touring and what it felt like to travel and play music. From that point, it was a matter of time until our eldest sister decided she wasn’t interested in touring full-time.
In 2010, that’s when Megan and I first started Larkin Poe, and we started writing original songs that were definitely still influenced by American roots music, which is definitely the music of our heart and soul. We started experimenting with harder rock sounds, with more acoustic pop sounds. We made a bunch of different records at the beginning of Larkin Poe, and genre bounced around and we just tried to figure out what felt right to us – what kind of records we wanted to make. We learned so much. We were able to do a lot of touring based on some of the foundations that we had made with the Lovell Sisters – especially in the U.S. And it gave us some time to experiment and to flesh out our story, to get a little bit older, to gain some experience.
I really think it’s only been in the last three or four years – and this is after almost 15 years of playing music professionally – that we really have come into our own in terms of really finally establishing our creative voice. On the last few records that we made, we have taken a different tack with them. We feel that these records serve as a coming home, where we have more thoroughly embraced our Southern heritage. We have done our best to educate ourselves in the musical histories of bluegrass music and mountain music and the blues music most recently, really delving deeply into the traditions of hill country blues and loving the music of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Junior Kimbrough, Son House, Skip James and R.L. Burnside. All of these guys that to our minds, and I think in the minds of many others, really shaped modern music with the pioneering that they did in blues music specifically. I think that you can hear a lot more of those influences in our last three records as we begin to embrace our home state. And that’s the story of Larkin Poe.
FM: Can you talk about how you approach both covering a song and writing?
Megan: First, going into the covers series that we do, very counterintuitively, performing these cover songs has actually helped us find our voice in a strange way. We started doing the covers a few years ago, mostly as a learning tool – like we wanted to stay fresh on our instruments and a great way to do that is just to learn other people’s music. We found that the more we performed those songs together, the more that we were finding songs that we grew up listening to or new favorites, or songs that we wished we had written, and we discovered how to make it sound like us. That’s been a learning process that has been so incredibly valuable to us to help distill what it means to be Larkin Poe and what is the Larkin Poe sound. We feel so thankful to have stumbled upon this learning tool e over the years – and it helped us connect with so many people, because the series on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram has gone viral. We have had a lot of people tuning in, a lot of people discovering us through these videos – it’s just been so incredible to be on that journey, and because of the series we sometimes go to places in the middle of the world that we’ve never been to, and can sell out shows. It’s pretty incredible.
As far as writing, on the songwriting side, Rebecca is the main writer for our band, so I’ll let her take the writing portion.
Rebecca: Thanks. I do feel as a songwriter it’s really important to educate yourself – and unless you’re someone like Tom Petty, who I feel probably came out of the womb writing his songs, there is a lot of muscle and sweat that you have to build up and shed in order to learn how to write well. Just like when you’re taking a picture, typically it takes 20 or 30 pictures to get one good picture. I think that can sometimes be also applied to songwriting. You’ve got to write a bunch of bad songs to be able to learn how to put yourself into the music and to tell a story that feels exciting and is relatable and vulnerable. I really do think the amount of songs we have learned at this point in our lives really is going into a wide range of genres from metal to bluegrass to pop to classic rock, and everything in between, and learning these different disciplines of musical styling, has really helped inform us as songwriters and as performers and as instrumentalists in a way that really has been such an asset and such a structured way to approach art, which is really definitely not structured – sometimes it’s hard to know how to get a toehold. But this has definitely been our way of teaching ourselves and of celebrating music.
I really do feel so grateful for the experience of learning all these songs whenever it’s time for me to sit down and write, because I’m able to channel a lot of energy that I certainly cannot take credit for. It’s energy that has been unlocked by learning compositions by Tom Waits or by Tom Petty – I’m only thinking of Toms right now apparently, but a lot of songwriters who are really gifted in the art of putting you in place and time: Leonard Cohen – someone who is able to really weave poetry and music together. It’s so inspiring. I think if you’re ever a songwriter who is stuck in a case of songwriter’s block, go and learn from your favorite songs. Memorize the lyrics, learn the chords. You’ll really be surprised at the way that it will loosen you up and kind of help you tap into some of those creative flows.
FM: There are not many women in the acoustic blues genre. It’s predominantly men, and it always has been that way. But there’s been some really great women over time, but in terms of numbers they are far fewer. In your experience, not only playing blues but just generally Americana, American roots music, you’re drawing a young audience into an old music. Can you talk about that? And also what it means to you as young women to represent this genre?
Rebecca: I do think it’s sobering that historically a lot of the women pioneers of blues music, while they were reaching their peak in the 1920s and ‘30s, they oftentimes are overlooked. You have artists like Bessie Smith, or Ma Rainey, or even Koko Taylor – these are women that were not only singing blues music, but in the case of a lot of these women shredding the guitar like Memphis Minne and Rosetta Tharpe – these women that were really powerful musicians. While they are outnumbered to their male counterparts, I really think it’s important to bear in mind that creative perspective ideally should be split 50/50. You really do need the female perspective as much as you do the male perspective in order to get an accurate reading of the general human creative perspective.
To be young white women playing blues music, I think that we feel really impassioned to not only hope we bring something new to the blues story, to write our own chapter onto the history, but also to pay tribute to those that have come before. While the first names that usually come to my mind, like Mississippi Fred McDowell or Son House – there are female artists that are hugely inspiring and deserve as much credit. I think it’s an inspiring time to be making music in the blues discipline because I think there’s more focus placed upon equality and focus placed upon equal opportunity. Musically it is really exciting, and I think you have Samantha Fish and a handful of blues artists that are really trying to take a new approach. That’s certainly been mine and Megan’s focus coming into blues music, feeling so much respect and passion for this style of music. It’s really more than just a musical styling; it’s a cultural pathway that has really led so much of the development of music and culture here in the U.S. since the turn of the century. I don’t feel that it really gets as much respect and reverence here, specifically in the U.S., as it should. It’s very easy to overlook roots American music in light of the global obsession with pop music and hip hop. I feel that as an artist that’s certainly making music very left of center, that doesn’t really fit rock radio or pop radio. It’s really important to stay strong and to bear in mind the mission statement of why we feel so strongly about purveying roots American music. Whenever we’re able to travel around the world and carry this music with us, music that is really strongly influenced by the music that comes from the southern United States, we feel like ambassadors. I think that’s really important, while also not treating blues music as a time capsule, because I think that’s the worse thing that you can do to something that is precious, is put it behind glass. I think letting blues music and bluegrass music and mountain music and these ancient forms of music to continue to grow and change and breathe and have life in them, I think that that’s really crucial., and that’s the way we approach making our records and wanting to pay tribute and pay homage, while also allowing our own unique differences to play into the music with our own perspective. Introducing a lot of new elements into the tradition, from more of a pop song structure to programmed elements, using hip hop hi-hat pattern – if that is something that you can use to push the boundary of blues and potentially opens up people’s ears who may not have ever thought that they would love the blues – if it gives them an opportunity to become enamored with the blues, then we’ve done a good job.
FM: I think you have managed to put excitement and fresh wind into the music. The biggest problem, as you said, I think with the blues is that it sometimes gets encapsulated and stuck in a museum. One problem I think in the genre is that the audience is pretty much the baby boomers for most of the artists. But in your case, you have managed to reach a younger audience and revive the genre in a certain way. Would you say that’s true or can you talk about that?
Rebecca: I would love to hear Megan’s opinion on this too. I don’t know that we can take that much credit personally. I don’t know that we’re reviving necessarily, because I do think there are a lot of strong undercurrents of blues music that are making waves, and however these waves are or not, they are definitely there. When we come into the studio or onto a stage, we’re doing our best to be a part of that resurgence, alongside the Tedeschi Trucks and the Samantha Fishes and the Joanne Shaw Taylors – like there are a wide number of artists. Megan, how does that strike you?
Megan: It’s a good question, because we do have a predominantly, slightly older audience, but lately we are seeing more and more younger people –people our own age becoming interested in this kind of music, and more just like music that has substance. I think of the ‘90s and the early 2000s there was all this new technology with music and synthesizers that people became really enamored with the technologies. I think that now that’s maybe passing a bit. I think there’s a bit of a resurgence to music of substance and playing guitar and loving to see the musicians as technicians of an instrument. I think there’s a lot of interest in that.
And we hope that we can hopefully be a conduit for people to see themselves represented in music. We love the idea of young people seeing us and thinking, “I can do that too” – and hopefully getting interested. We do have a big hope for that and we are seeing a lot more young people getting involved – especially as we’ve become more and more active on the social media. That’s a way to get in touch with those people, because sometimes it’s just not easy for younger people to come face to face with this kind of music. I think that social media is one way to get in touch with them.
FM: What is the most important thing that you want our readers around the world to know about you?
Rebecca: A large part of our creative message to people is that of empowerment. If you put your mind to something creatively, it is really surprising sometimes what you can achieve. DIY (Do It Yourself) is our bible – approaching things and doing it yourself is really something that means a lot to us as individuals, and we’ve really taken that to heart with our songwriting and our musicianship and the way that we make records and the way that we release those records: we have our own record label now. We’ve been producing all of our own records the past three or four records that we made. I think I would really encourage people to feel empowered in their ability to try something new, to live creatively, to make something up, to draw, to paint, to pick up a guitar and see what kind of joy it might bring into their lives. That’s something that we definitely have striven for over the last few years, living creatively. It’s a wonderful way to bring fulfillment and joy into your life. I would really encourage other people to take a similar path if possible – just to try it.
…That was awesome energy – other than we’re just super excited to get back out on the road and see people whenever we can. So, hopefully it won’t be too long.
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