Sisters, Blues, and a Record Made in Under a Week: Larkin Poe Unplugged at Audiotree Live

On a Monday afternoon in late August 2017, the Chicago recording studio at Audiotree became something closer to a front porch in the Deep South. Rebecca and Megan Lovell ?" the Georgia-raised sisters who make up Larkin Poe ?" arrived carrying the kind of effortless, lived-in musical authority that most bands spend entire careers chasing. What followed was a session that crackled with raw blues energy, disarming candor, and the unmistakable chemistry of two people who have been making music together since they were teenagers.

From the First Note, Something Different

Larkin Poe wasted no time establishing the tone of the afternoon. The duo launched straight into their opening number ?" a bluesy, swaggering declaration of restless spirit rooted in the kind of Southern-fried storytelling that calls to mind smoky roadhouses and red clay back roads. The song drew on the legacy of classic blues giants, evoking a lineage that stretches from Albert King's Fillmore nights to the raw, electric urgency of modern Americana. Rebecca's vocals cut through the room with a gritty conviction that belied her years, while Megan's slide guitar work wove underneath like a second voice ?" sometimes mournful, sometimes menacing, always magnetic.

It was clear from the outset that Larkin Poe are not a band performing the blues so much as a band inhabited by it. The music spoke of trouble carried in the mind and the soul, of grace lost and found and lost again ?" themes worn comfortably, like a well-traveled leather jacket. The Audiotree studio, typically home to intimate indie and folk sessions, felt charged with something bigger than its walls.

Two Sisters, One Band, a Decade on the Road

Between songs, the sisters settled into easy conversation with their host ?" relaxed, funny, and refreshingly unguarded. Asked about the particular dynamics of collaborating with a sibling, Rebecca didn't romanticize it, but she didn't downplay it either.

"We've been working together and making music since we were children. We started touring when I was like 15 and she was 16 ?" of our own volition. Our folks were suspect on the whole concept, but we went full steam ahead and just kind of made it happen for the last decade of our lives."

The road, as both women acknowledged, has not always been smooth. Navigating the music industry as young women, building an audience from the ground up, and doing it all while maintaining a sisterly relationship ?" it demanded resilience in generous quantities. But the Lovells speak about those years without bitterness, and with a good deal of wry humor. Megan noted the advantage of a kind of shorthand communication that only comes from sharing a childhood ?" a nonverbal fluency that makes their performances feel so intuitive.

"There's a lot of nonverbal communication, and a lot of perks of being sisters that far outweigh any negatives we've encountered. We come from the same background, so it's easy to play together. We love it."

And just to set the record straight ?" because apparently it comes up often ?" they are not twins. Rebecca is two years younger than Megan. Megan made sure that point was clearly understood. Rebecca, with impeccable timing, noted that she'd been thrown under the bus. The studio laughed.

The Ghost of Edgar Allan Poe

The band's name invites a natural question, and the answer is more interesting than most people expect. Larkin Poe is not an invented moniker or a lyrical abstraction ?" it belongs to the sisters' great-great-great-great-grandfather, a man who happened to be a distant cousin of Edgar Allan Poe. As lyricists with a deep reverence for the written word, both women grew up captivated by the gothic poet's work, and wearing that family name carries a weight they clearly cherish.

"As lyricists, that always has great gravity for us, because we grew up loving so much of Edgar Allan Poe's stuff. It's just a cool thing."

Asked whether the famous literary lineage creates any pressure to perform at a certain level of artistic brilliance, Rebecca laughed off the suggestion with characteristic self-deprecation ?" though she was quick to acknowledge the more unsettling side of the inheritance.

"Dude was certifiably insane. So there's also sort of a terror of ?" please God, let it not be so that we have inherited genes from this man."

Their host suggested that a little inherited insanity might not be the worst thing for a musician. The sisters agreed ?" enthusiastically, and with the air of people who have already accepted that it may be too late to worry about it.

High Energy, High Stakes: Life on the Bob Seger Tour

At the time of the Audiotree session, Larkin Poe were in the early days of a support slot on Bob Seger's arena tour ?" a significant leap in scale for a band that had built its reputation through grassroots gigging and an intensely devoted fan base. The experience, by all accounts, had been both thrilling and nerve-wracking in equal measure.

"We've played arenas in Nashville before, but this was the first time ever doing it on home soil, and with an artist that we respect so much. He has such a lovely crowd of people out to see him ?" people who are there to really experience songs and artistry. And he delivers that. So for us, stepping up and wanting to bring something of value to the show ?" it was really intimidating at first."

By the time they arrived at Audiotree, the duo had played just two dates of the tour and were already finding their rhythm. With two shows remaining ?" including a stop in Detroit, Seger's hometown ?" there was a palpable sense that the duo had turned a corner, transforming nerves into exhilaration. The inevitability of the tour ending just as they'd fully settled in drew a knowing laugh from everyone in the room.

Pre-show rituals, it turned out, were refreshingly unglamorous. There are no elaborate superstitions, no green room demands. The Lovells admitted to a pre-show jumping-around session backstage ?" something between a warm-up and an adrenaline injection. One sister compared it to a Rocky training montage, and nobody in the room disagreed with that characterization. When pressed for anything more exotic, Rebecca deadpanned that the group typically sacrifices rabbits and draws pentagrams in sand before performing. Her delivery was so measured that the host briefly entertained the possibility that she was serious.

Peach: A Record Born in Less Than a Week

The conversation turned to the upcoming release of Peach ?" an album set for a September 29th release date and one of the most extraordinary origin stories in recent independent music. The record, a love letter to traditional blues and Southern roots music, was conceived, recorded, and completed in under a week. Both sisters played every instrument on it. Neither of them had slept properly in days.

"We decided to create a record that really represented our Southern roots ?" a lot of traditional blues covers and some of our originals that we felt really helped support where we come from and the kind of music we've grown up listening to."

The album's title carries an obvious geographic meaning: though born in Tennessee, the Lovells were raised in Georgia, and peaches, in their world, are less a fruit than a state of mind. The name also appears in their live material, woven into the imagery of the music with the easy familiarity of a hometown reference. It suits them.

The logistics of making Peach were, by any conventional industry standard, bordering on reckless. The sisters had been simultaneously supporting Bob Seger on a major arena run, operating on minimal sleep, and somehow carving out the creative space to produce an album from scratch. Asked whether this constituted the Edgar Allan Poe inheritance manifesting in real time, Rebecca admitted, without hesitation, that yes ?" it probably did.

The Music Speaks Louder

Across the afternoon, Larkin Poe performed a set that demonstrated exactly why the music industry, the blogosphere, and audiences from Nashville to Chicago have been paying close attention. Each song carved out its own emotional territory. A slinky, tension-filled number explored themes of desire and manipulation, its groove building slowly like summer heat. A defiant outlaw anthem ?" rollicking and unrepentant ?" conjured images of getaways across the Rio Grande, wanted posters, and deals struck below the poverty line with considerably more interesting parties. A final electrified rocker crackled with raw energy, riffing on the language of circuits and voltage to describe something far more human and untameable.

Throughout it all, the Lovells were entirely present ?" locked into each other musically in the way that only years of shared experience can produce. Rebecca's voice ranged from a purring intimacy to a full-throated wail. Megan's guitar playing was simultaneously technically assured and emotionally uninhibited. Together, they produced a sound considerably larger than two people have any right to.

On Eclipses, Guitar Centers, and Being Gloriously Normal

Not everything about the afternoon was weighty. Days before the session, a total solar eclipse had swept across the continental United States ?" and Nashville, sitting directly in the path of totality, had given the Lovells a front-row seat. They had watched it with clear skies overhead, surrounded by strangers who dissolved briefly into a collective, awestruck community.

"It felt very connective, because we were outside and there were just hundreds of strangers around us, and everyone started screaming and having little mini meltdowns. That kind of human awareness was awesome."

Their host, who had been denied a clear view by Chicago cloud cover, received this information with the good-natured resignation of someone who has accepted that the universe occasionally plays favorites. The sisters, to their credit, expressed genuine sympathy ?" though not enough to pretend their experience had been anything less than perfect.

For all their creative ambition and the scale of their current endeavors, both sisters were insistent on one particular self-description: gloriously, unremarkably normal. They stop at Guitar Centers on tour. They talk obsessively about iRig audio interfaces. They practice constantly. They are, in their own words, just people who play music and write songs ?" people for whom the craft itself is the point, the reward, and the daily occupation.

"We're all so terribly normal. We're just people who play music and write songs and obsessively practice."

What Comes Next

As the session wound down, the conversation briefly touched on what lay immediately ahead. Alongside the imminent release of Peach, Larkin Poe were set to appear at the Pilgrimage Festival in Franklin, Tennessee ?" a homecoming of sorts, and a chance to share a bill with Gary Clark Jr., an artist the sisters spoke about with audible enthusiasm. The two acts had recently shared a stage, and by all accounts, the chemistry had been electric.

It's a schedule that would exhaust most bands. But for the Lovells, the relentless pace feels less like pressure than like purpose. They are a band in the midst of becoming ?" not in the tentative, uncertain sense, but in the full-throttle, no-sleep, let's-make-a-record-this-week sense. The blues they play has always been music about surviving hard things with your head up and your volume loud. Watching Larkin Poe work, it becomes apparent that they don't just perform that ethos. They live it.

Peach was released September 29th, 2017. For tour dates and new music, visit larkinpoe.com.