SPOTLIGHT: “It’s different when you mean it”: Larkin Poe Prove They’re Forever In ‘Bloom’ 

Editor’s Note: Larkin Poe are No Depression’s Spotlight artists for January 2025. Their new album, ‘Bloom,’ is out January 24 via Tricki-Woo Records. Read about them in this Spotlight Feature and look out for more all month long. 

“And the Grammy goes to … Blood Harmony, Larkin Poe!” 

Those aren’t necessarily the words roots rock outfit Larkin Poe were anticipating when the bandleaders, sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell, took a quick trip to Los Angeles for the illustrious Grammy awards ceremony in February 2024. Their pin-stripped pockets emptied of expectation, they hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech. 

By the time the awards season arrived, the follow-up album to Larkin Poe’s 2022 opus, Blood Harmony, was well underway, and the siblings were approaching the nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album with a kind of calculated care. 

“I do think we were trying to hold space and not have any expectation attached to winning,” Rebecca recalls of the lead up to the awards. She describes the coil of emotions and the tug-of-war between indifference and desire she felt about the accolade. “When we did actually end up winning, it was such a surprise.” 

The victory was far from a career-altering moment. In fact, it seemed to do little more than reassure the sisters, like a cosmic thumbs up from the universe letting them know they had been on the right path all along.  

Over the course of several albums and some 15 years, the Lovell sisters carved out their own little slice in the male-dominated roots rock genre. With their plush harmonies and valiant six-stringed chops, they’ve given life to a blend of guttural blues and sultry Southern rock.  They’ve done so virtually on their own terms. In 2017 they founded Tricki-Woo Records in order to make the music they wanted how they wanted. The Grammy win merely affirmed their position at the wheel. 

With a renewed sense of purpose and a resharpened focus, they returned to Nashville after the awards to the nascent pieces of their new album, Bloom. 

Whereas Blood Harmony grabbed listeners by the collar, visceral wails of steel and a barrage of strings casting Larkin Poe in a proud and assertive light, Bloom takes listeners by the hand. The album invites us inward to experience another side of the sister act: one that’s deeply human – flawed, vulnerable, and forever taking shape. 

“Who was I before / I took it on the chin / Watching a little more / Of me blow away on the wind,” the pair admit on the exuberant opening track, “Mockingbird,” as they boldly embrace the inevitability of change and the beauty of personal evolution. “I listened to the whispers / Bending out of shape / To fit into a picture / I didn’t even want to take.”

“Going in, we really did want to write honest songs,” Megan explains. And they did. They’ve steadily hinted at this new direction with a number of sincere singles like the aforementioned “Mockingbird” and the weightless “Little Bit,” a song that strips away all the extra to get to the heart of what the sisters truly want in life: just a little bit. 

It’s not that their music up until this point has lacked honesty. Quite the opposite. For years, the Lovells have been stalwarts of contemporary blues rock, committing to a style that is intrinsically rooted in tradition while also ensuring that their personal experiences shine through. This balancing act between tradition and their truth is one they’ve perfected but one that has, at times, restricted them. 

In records past, they flirted with formulaic songs, apprehensive to stray from the home they’ve found in the blues rock sphere. “That has really worked great for us,” Rebecca says “and it has taught us so much, and we’ve been so thoroughly embraced by the blues community. But we were feeling like there is a little bit of this internal struggle of cauterizing off certain parts of ourselves in order to exist in this blues rock space.” 

At times, that particular niche has kept them from diving head first into more vulnerable themes and lyrics, feeling the need to armor themselves in a certain persona. As Megan explains, “A lot of the characters in blues rock are bulletproof, swaggy characters, and I don’t know that we necessarily are that.”  

Across Bloom, listeners will instead encounter two fearless adventurers of the soul, devoted to traversing their past, all of its triumphs and shortcomings, and welcoming all that’s still to come. The sisters reach into their depths, pulling forth songs like the staggering anthem, “Bluephoria,” and the gentle closer, “Bloom Again,” which both speak to the nuances that so often shade this journey we’re all on. With offerings like the quaking “If God Is A Woman” and the biting “Pearls,” they strip away the artifice of the modern world, to pick away at the meaning of it all.   

While infusing that kind of lived-in honesty into art sounds as natural as breathing, it takes work. “You do have to kind of break yourself down a little bit and really try to hone in on every line and say, ‘Is this real? Yeah, sure, it rhymes and it sounds good, but do I mean it?’” Megan says. “It’s different when you mean it.” 

While they usually approach the penning of songs separately, the sisters were devoted to writing Bloom with one another. By writing together they found they could deepen the meaning in their lyrics.  

“It was such an effortless process,” Rebecca remembers. “I think it was that commitment of like, ‘Alright, we’re doing it different this time. Let’s go. We don’t have any preconceived ideas about genre or theme. We’re writing whatever we are going to write together, and we’re not going to judge it. We’re going to love it into the world, let it be what it is.’”

That approach landed Larkin Poe on the cusp of something big. Several albums and some 15 years later, the Lovells seem to be just getting started, their music, their creative process, their sisterhood forever in bloom. 

“I think that a lot of these songs aren’t where we’ve ended up; they’re mantras for where we want to get to,” Megan says. “I think there’ll be really good reminders of where we are now and the hopes that we have for the future.”