Photo: Robby Klein

“From the outset, we knew that we wanted to continue the journey that we’ve been on since the beginning of Larkin Poe. The driving ethos is to continue to get more and more authentic with the songs that we write,” Rebecca Lovell reflects, while considering the means by which she and her sister Megan developed the material on their new album, Bloom. “A lot of times, we’ve found that’s easier said than done because it takes a lot of vulnerability and self confidence in order to write from a very authentic place. With Blood Harmony, we got a lot closer to that goal of trying to write from our unique first person perspective. But our goal was to get further along that trail with Bloom. So from that lens, we sort of wrote and recorded everything with the goal of greater self-discovery.”

While the Lovells were working on the record, they learned that Blood Harmony had received a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album. Megan recalls: “We had set aside a time period when we knew we were going to have the space to be able to record, since we tour so much and don’t really ever take a break from touring year to year. We knew that around January was when we were going to start writing for the album. The Grammy win came in the middle of the writing process which was pretty cool. A lot of people have asked if it introduced pressure, the idea of, ‘Oh, now we have to make a follow-up record and it has to do as well.’ We didn’t feel any of that. I think it gave us a pretty big confidence boost and some wind beneath our wings.”

“I think it’s a very conversational record,” Rebecca observes. “It’s a record that is born of songs that literally spun themselves out of conversations that Megan and I were having, that Megan and Tyler Bryant—who is our co-producer and my husband— were having, that Tyler and I were having and that the three of us were having together. All of these songs represent a very specific point in time—hitting our early 30s and processing it. You’re not quite young, you’re not quite old, you’re kind of somewhere in the middle. So we’re figuring out what success looks like to us. We’re asking ourselves, ‘What are we talking about? What are we dealing with? What are we grappling with?’ Then it’s about figuring out how to funnel all that into an artistic project.”

Mockingbird

REBECCA: “Mockingbird” was a song that we wrote while Megan, Tyler and I were sitting in my kitchen. We started kind of bandying about with the melody and the changes. It was sort of this hand-in-glove experience of the lyrics and the melody starting to play with each other and coalesce in some way.

The beauty of Megan and my creative collaboration is that we come together like interlocking pieces. One of the elements of our band that I find so special is the fact that we have two lead singers. I sing with my voice and Megan sings with her slide guitar. So the roles that riffs serve in our band are of paramount importance to any of the vocal melodies that we write.

For Larkin Poe, typically as the song is coming together, we’re immediately thinking of what the guitars are going to be doing. What is the lap steel going to be singing? So I have to shout out Megan—I think this is one of my favorite riffs on the record. It’s so singable and so beautiful and serves as the perfect counterpoint for the soaring melody. Hearing Megan just blissing above the band with her guitar feels like a bird in f light to me.

Easy Love Part 1

REBECCA: This is a love song. Larkin Poe doesn’t have many love songs—we’ve sort of steered away a bit from love songs over the years—so I think it’s pretty cool that this album has two or three actual love songs. I’m proud of us for being willing to vulnerably share about our romantic relationships.

“Easy Love Part 1” is inspired, down to the details, by my husband Tyler. He was born in Paris, Texas, where there is in fact a replica of the Eiffel Tower with a little cowboy hat on top. Being willing to put some specifics about the nature of our relationship—and the fact that our love really has been a lot like falling off a log—felt very sweet to write.

All that being said, one of my favorite parts of the song is the section that Megan and I co-wrote when we were in the studio. We typically start off with an acoustic work tape on an iPhone and then get it a little bit closer by doing a rough demo in the studio. That’s when we realized that the song was incomplete. It felt a little bit boxy. So Megan and I came together and wrote that middle section. We were kind of going for a J.J. Cale vibe on that track and a little bit of a Cream energy. Megan’s just riffing over the top, the keys are changing, she’s rolling with the punches and it just feels super ‘70s and rock-and-roll. I’m proud of that section as it really rounds out the song.

Little Bit

MEGAN: “Little Bit” is definitely the result of us thinking about Larkin Poe—where we want to go and what success looks like to us now that we are in our 30s. We’re looking for different things in our lives than we did in our 20s or in our teens when we started Larkin Poe. We always have people coming up to us and saying things like, “Oh, if you just had a hit song” or “If you could just do this, then you would be a household name” or “What’s the focus? Do you want to play arenas? Do you want to play stadiums?”

In our minds, we really love where we are now. We feel success here because we connect deeply with people. We’re able to make the kind of records we want to make, when we want to make them. We have a lot of control and freedom in what we do. It’s pretty amazing and it’s been a hard-won gift.

So “Little Bit” is speaking to this idea that sometimes more isn’t always more, sometimes more can be less. Sometimes where you are is exactly where you need to be and we just need a little bit of music and a little bit of travel and a little bit of this and that, which can be enough.

Bluephoria

REBECCA: This started when I was standing next to my 21-year-old brother while he was drinking a can of Yerba Mate. It had this really cool tribal pattern and when I asked him what flavor it was, he told me, “Bluephoria.” I was like, “What did you just say?” He said, “The f lavor is Bluephoria.” Right then and there I was like, “Oh, my God, I’m going to write a song called ‘Bluephoria.’ That’s the best title.” Now this is our brother’s favorite song we’ve ever made because he was the direct inspiration. [Laughs.]

So we had the chorus. We knew we were going to say ‘bluephoria’ a lot because it sounds so cool and it really does describe a euphoric sense of sorrow. But that being said, we needed to go elsewhere with the song thematically because you couldn’t just stay there.

I was listening to the Joni Mitchell record Hejira and she has this song called “Furry Sings the Blues.” It’s a scathing song about how Memphis is in decay and decrepit. She references Furry Lewis by name and she really speaks down to him. I kind of got obsessed with the song, so I went down a rabbit hole on the internet. Furry was alive when she released this song. To her credit, on Joni Mitchell’s website there is a blog where someone interviewed Furry about the song. In the interview, he is furious at Joni for having spoken so defamatorily of Memphis and also for using his name. He basically said that he was outraged that she was cashing in on his identity and then not even being nice about it. Then at one point, he slyly winks at the interviewer, and he’s like, “I know I’m not a star, but maybe I’m a moon.”

When I read that line, I thought it was genius. What a cool concept—I’m not a star, but I’m a moon. So that served as the inspiration for fleshing out that concept into the second verse for “Bluephoria.”

MEGAN: I feel like that verse is for me because it describes me very well. I’m a more introspective person, a little bit quieter. I don’t sing lead in the band, yet I am present in Larkin Poe. It is very clearly the two of us, yet I wouldn’t naturally seek out the spotlight.

While the sun provides a lot of our light, the moon also serves its purpose in the impact that it has upon the world. So I felt, “OK, this is something I can buy into. I can live in this space.”

Easy Love Part 2

REBECCA: During the pandemic, my husband Tyler set up this home recording studio. It was such a boon for our whole family because it allowed us unfettered access to the studio without running up a price tag.

So one night after we had recorded “Easy Love Part 1” and everybody had left the studio, Tyler and I were upstairs in our home. As we were cooking dinner, we were still singing, “Easy love, easy love.” Then we started messing around with it, making it more sultry—just having fun singing it at each other. At some point, we were sitting in the bedroom with an acoustic guitar and we realized that we had written another song that we really liked. The next morning, when Megan came over, we told her: “We kind of did this thing. Is it stupid to have two songs about easy love?”

MEGAN: We tried to change the lyrics to something else but nothing had the same feel. Then we were like: “Why do we have to change it? We’ll just make it a part two because it actually was a part two.”

Nowhere Fast

REBECCA: “Nowhere Fast” is the only song on the record that was written purely for the party. We went through every other song line by line with a fine tooth comb, asking, “Does this represent us? Is this true? Is this a firsthand experience?” Then for “Nowhere Fast,” we decided that we wanted to write a song that turns on the very last line of the first verse, where the music stops and we go, “Georgia does it the best!”

Megan and I were sitting there scheming and we were like, “You know what? It would be so fun to be on stage—whether we were in Paris, Minneapolis, Dallas or wherever—and at that moment in the show hit that line and change Georgia to the name of the city we happened to be in.” We were just tickled by that idea. So even though, strictly speaking, “Nowhere Fast” pales in comparison to the other songs’ personal relevance, we put it on just so we could have that moment. We were like, “Hell, yeah, this is going to get the people hyped!”

If God Is a Woman

MEGAN: Throughout the Larkin Poe discography over the past few records, we have enjoyed pointing to the idea of gender stereotyping and the harm it can cause. We’ve been trying to talk about it in a bit of a playful way, though, with a song like “She’s a Self Made Man.”

“If God Is a Woman” comes from a similar viewpoint where people think about women as angels—they’re sweet and nice and always proper and doing the right thing. Of course, it’s not always that way. Women are a lot more nuanced than that, which should be represented in the way we speak about them. “If God Is a Woman” is trying to address that with a little bit of a twist.

Something else I love about this song is we’re really influenced by blues, and there’s a lot of religious iconography in the lyricism of blues music. So I think this is a cool way to take that tradition and flip it on its head.

Pearls

REBECCA: We’ve earned our stripes out on the road touring extensively and we’ll still run into venue staff who try to tell us how to tune our guitars. We’ve built up calluses over the years between ourselves and people’s expectations of who they think we might be. So “Pearls” is our little punk-girl anthem.

Particularly as Southern raised women, there is a very narrow lane of what is and isn’t appropriate behavior. Being able to rail against that theme and get some energy out felt really good for this record. I am excited to rip that one out on stage.

MEGAN: When we were writing “Pearls,” we were also specifically talking about social media and how there’ll be dozens of positive, supportive comments. Then for some reason, our psyches kind of lock onto that one negative one.

Throughout our career, even when we were young artists, people like Elvis Costello put a lot of faith in us and brought us out on the road. We’ve had a lot of people in our corner, so it’s on us to put the focus on those who have been kind and trusting.

There’s a flip side though, and while the negative people have been few and far between, sometimes we just need a “Pearls” to remind us that we don’t have to hang onto those moments.

Fool Outta Me

MEGAN: This is one of my favorite tracks. I think that I am the most proud of the solo on this one.

One of my favorite musicians is David Lindley. He’s a really incredible lap steel player who passed away just over a year ago. He has one of the most iconic guitar solos of all time, which is the solo on “Running on Empty.”

Tyler and I were talking about tones for the record, thinking  about what direction we wanted to go and if there was anything different we wanted to try. I started talking about David Lindley and I realized that I hadn’t thought too much about his tone, other than thinking that it’s one of the most legendary tones of all time. I had never looked up David Lindley’s rig, which was such an oversight. So Tyler did some digging around and came up with Lindley’s rig, which I thought was so smart because it led us in a bit of a different direction for the album.

We ended up kind of copying Lindley’s rig, which he played through a Dumble amp. We couldn’t get a Dumble amp because they’re worth between 100 and 200K at this point, but we did have an amazing sort of Dumble clone made by Tyler Amps. So I plugged into that sucker, cranked it up and it inspired the tone for the record.

“Fool Outta Me” was the first one where we tried for that tone and it pulled something different out of my playing. I was hearing myself, but I was also hearing David Lindley somewhere in the ether. I really love listening to it because in some ways it sounds like me, but in some ways it doesn’t.

You Are the River

REBECCA: In the same way that “Fool Outta Me” has special significance for Megan, “You Are the River” is a very meaningful song for me. I was having a particularly rough day in the studio when we were writing it. It was a dark, overcast day and I was very emotional. This is not something that we talk a lot about, but as touring musicians, there’s a lot of additional pressure placed on the whole concept of parenthood and trying to start a family. I’d actually had a miscarriage on tour about nine months prior, and a lot of deep emotional energy came out in “You Are the River.” I wouldn’t say I’d repressed it, but I wrote the song very specifically for myself as a reminder that you have to be patient.

Particularly when it comes to anyone who has dealt with any sort of fertility ups and downs, it requires a light touch with yourself and just going with the flow. That idea of coming into our own and not trying to control ourselves anymore appears throughout the record.

In that spirit, “You Are the River” leads into a journey of self-reclamation. It sounds so cliché and trite, but there’s a goddamn rainbow after a storm. Life can be a beautiful journey if we choose to imbue the journey with meaning.

MEGAN: It was also written about the situation at hand, which was that we were almost done writing and felt like nothing was going to come. We were in an end-of-writing slump where it just felt like there was nothing left. Then, all of a sudden, Rebecca started singing—there were lyrics, there was thought. It was about that specific moment of having faith in what will follow.

REBECCA: I have a “Laughing Heart” tattoo on my arm and in that poem Charles Bukowski says: “Be on the watch/ There are ways out/ There is light somewhere/ It may not be much light but/ It beats the darkness/ Be on the watch/ The gods will offer you chances/ Know them/ Take them/ You can’t beat death but/ You can beat death in life, sometimes/ And the more often you learn to do it/ The more light there will be/ Your life is your life/ Know it while you have it/ You are marvelous/ The gods wait to delight in you.”

It’s about believing in the process. All these things that we see written on little frigging bric-a-brac at Hobby Lobby and put on the wall, that shit’s actually true. The sages and the fools, like, “Oh, my God, the fool is so wise”—it’s all true. You’ve got to trust the process, bitch. Buckle up!

Bloom Again

REBECCA: Back in 2023, we had a really cool headlining show in Los Angeles. We’ve been friendly with Steve Ferrone and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for quite a few years. So whenever we come through Los Angeles, we hit those guys up. When we came through on this particular tour, we asked if they would want to come out and jam with us. They both agreed and it was a really special experience to be on stage with them. I think they were playing together for the first time in seven or eight years, and we were all jamming “Runnin’ Down a Dream” together.

Both of the guys were side stage watching us perform. After the show, Mike came up to us and he said, “I really enjoyed your show and if I could make a suggestion, I think you need to write a song in the style of the Everly Brothers.”

We kind of stuck that in our back pockets. Then when it came time to start writing for the new album, Megan and I were like, “Let’s take a chip off the old block from somebody who knows what the hell they’re talking about.” So we sat down and started singing the melodies for what became “Bloom Again” in the style of the Everly Brothers.

MEGAN: This was the first song that we specifically wrote for the record, and it ended up going on the record, which isn’t always the case. Sometimes you take a few stabs at a song and you’re like, “OK, we’re just getting going.” But with this one, we just started riffing together, singing harmony and “Bloom Again” fell out. It came together very quickly and that was a pretty special way to start. It felt like it was a gift—“OK, we’re going to give you an easy first step.”

That ended up essentially being the title track for the album and it all came together from there.