What Larkin Poe Learned From 15 Years of Getting It Wrong

Two Sisters, Fifteen Years, and a Very Public Learning Curve

Megan and Rebecca Lovell have been making music professionally since the mid 2000s. That is roughly two decades of records, tours, label deals, genre changes, and course corrections, most of it documented in public. When they sat down at Carter Vintage Guitars for Playback Sessions, they did not tell the tidy version of that story. They told the messy one.

What emerged is one of the most useful conversations a working guitarist can listen to, not because Larkin Poe cracked some code, but because they did not. They tried things, discarded things, signed deals they later exited, and eventually built a career on the specific thing that most trained musicians spend years trying to eliminate: imperfection.

From Classical Violin to Banjo to Lap Steel

Both sisters started on violin around age three or four, classically trained, reading music off the page. Rebecca credits that training with something more valuable than technique.

I am thankful for the training because I think it taught us how to practice and how to learn.

That is worth sitting with. Classical training is often criticized for producing players who cannot improvise, and the Lovells experienced exactly that limitation. But the meta skill, knowing how to break something down and repeat it until it is yours, transferred to every instrument they picked up afterward.

The turn came in their early teens at a bluegrass festival. The idea that you could invent something in the moment rather than execute what was written was, in Rebecca's words, otherworldly. They quit classical lessons cold turkey.

What happened next is a small lesson in ensemble thinking. Rather than all three sisters staying on violin, they deliberately split up. The oldest, the strongest violinist, moved to fiddle. Rebecca took mandolin and banjo. Megan tried several fretted instruments, decided frets were not for her, heard Dobro, connected the dots to slide guitar, and never looked back.

Megan's Dobro Education

Megan studied briefly with Lou Wamp in Chattanooga, a few months only. The rest was Jerry Douglas records.

I learned every solo that he ever played on every record that I could find and that was really my education.

This is the oldest and most reliable method in roots music. Pick one master, exhaust their catalog, transcribe everything. It is slow, it is unglamorous, and it works. If you are learning slide, resonator, or lap steel, the Jerry Douglas catalog (start with Slide Rule) is still the deep end of the pool.

Going Electric Was an Act of Rebellion

When Larkin Poe formed around 2010, the obvious path was folk Americana. Two bluegrass raised sisters with gorgeous harmony, acoustic instruments, beautiful tone. Everyone expected it.

So they plugged in.

Stepping in front of amplifiers, dialing up some distortion at that point in our lives felt very rebellious. I do think being able to make music that felt a little uglier was good for our souls.

Megan's move to lap steel came from the same impulse. She wanted the rock and roll influences of their childhood, and lap steel was the electric translation of the slide vocabulary she already owned. That instrument choice is worth noting for anyone stuck between acoustic and electric worlds: the fastest way forward is often to find the electric cousin of what you already play well rather than starting from zero.

The Label Years and Why They Went Independent

Before Larkin Poe, as the Lovell Sisters, they signed to a Disney label at fourteen and fifteen. The label envisioned them as the next Chicks, wanted to pair them with outside songwriters, and wanted a producer to determine the sound. They got out of the deal.

Rebecca is generous about it in hindsight. At fourteen, they were not great songwriters. But as she puts it, the things the label wanted them to say were not things they wanted on record as having said. That distinction, between not yet being good and not being yourself, drove everything after.

In 2017 they started their own label and began self producing. At that point they were not making money as Larkin Poe and were paying bills as side musicians in other people's touring bands. The label was not a victory lap. It was a decision made at a low point.

What Actually Changed

The technical shift was self production. The psychological shift was bigger. Rebecca describes writing from what she calls a scarcity mindset:

You put an idea on the page and you are like, all right, it is there. And it may be the last idea that I ever have. I do not want to tweak with it because I do not know how many more ideas I am going to have.

Letting go of that preciousness, trusting that ideas keep arriving the way breath does, is what allowed them to revise, experiment, and eventually have fun with records. If you are a songwriter who hoards half finished ideas because you are afraid to ruin them, this is the note.

The Small Batch Mentality

Larkin Poe describe themselves as a small batch band. They are not chasing a million listeners. They are chasing the fifty people in Cologne and Paris whose faces they have recognized across fifteen years of touring.

That philosophy was tested directly. After winning a Grammy for the contemporary blues record Blood Harmony, they were offered a clear path: double down, become the heir apparent to contemporary blues, keep the analytics happy. Instead they made Bloom, which landed an Americana Grammy nomination and confused a portion of their audience.

The Writing Process Changed With It

This is the most practically useful part of the conversation for songwriters. On previous records, they wrote from guitar riffs and song titles, building ideas separately and workshopping them in the studio. That method kept steering them into blues genre conventions, heavy on metaphor, iconography, and character voice.

I love writing a female empowerment song where I am kicking down the door and I am badass and I am drinking, I am partying, and actually I am learning how to crochet.

For Bloom, they reversed the order. Lyrics first, born out of actual conversations between the two of them, with music built to serve the words. The result was a record that sounded different because the writing entry point was different.

Try this: if your songs keep coming out in the same lane, change your entry point. Riff first, lyric first, title first, and groove first all produce different songs from the same writer.

Perfection, AI, and the Case for Playing Ugly

Asked about AI and the erosion of instrumental craft, Megan gave the sharpest line of the interview.

AI cannot play perfectly imperfect.

Rebecca expanded on why perfectionism runs so deep for players of their generation, raised on radio records that were autotuned, time aligned, sliced, and duplicated like a machine part. Both sisters came from disciplines (classical and bluegrass) that reward flawless execution. Unlearning that is genuinely hard.

Rebecca also admitted to significant imposter syndrome on guitar. She came to electric relatively late and still considers herself an acoustic player at heart who plays electric most nights. Megan, by contrast, she describes as an intuitive player who on a good day simply tells you how she feels through the instrument.

The Cognitive Dissonance Every Player Has to Hold

Their conclusion is not that technique does not matter. It is that technique is a means, not an end.

You have got to learn how to play your instrument. But you have got to let it be for the love of the instrument, not because your ego is involved in wanting to play a fast riff. You want to know enough on your instrument to be able to be yourself as a player.

You practice so that when the moment arrives you are not limited by technique and the idea can get out. Facility is the vehicle. Expression is the destination.

What Their Practice Actually Looks Like

Rebecca on mandolin returns to fiddle tunes and competition pieces from her teens, plus the Strength in Numbers records and Bela Fleck's Acoustic Planet material. Megan revisits Jerry Douglas melodies from Slide Rule and calls it comforting.

Neither of them claims a rigorous daily regimen on guitar. Rebecca openly says she does not have a great practice routine and is still figuring out her voice as an electric player. That is a Grammy winner talking.

The Cover Song Method

Their most powerful development tool has been their YouTube cover series, Tip of the Hat, now numbering in the hundreds of songs.

You take somebody else's work but then you have to figure out how it fits within your own vocabulary and how you are going to play that riff.

The constraint is the education. Take a song recorded by ten musicians in a studio and arrange it for two people. You have to decide what is essential, who covers what, and how to keep it recognizable while making it yours. Rebecca says flatly that this series is what taught them to build the bones of Larkin Poe.

Try this: pick a full band song you love and arrange it for one guitar and one voice. You will learn more about arrangement, voice leading, and your own instincts in a weekend than in a month of scale practice.

The Elvis Costello Lesson: Be Dangerous On Stage

Both sisters describe Elvis Costello as the most dangerous performer they have shared a stage with. He would count off songs they had never played. Songs would morph mid performance into different songs with no warning.

It was amazing to have an artist of his caliber trust me enough to do that. That gave me faith in myself.

Costello also functioned as a music historian for them, pushing them back into the blues canon and once handing them an eight pound DVD box set of German blues performance footage from the 1980s. Rebecca watched it for hours on a secondhand elliptical in her basement during the pandemic.

The performance takeaway: audiences come to live shows for the possibility that something unrepeatable will happen. If your set is identical every night, you have made a Netflix episode with amplifiers.

Gear Note: Megan's Beard Electrolite

Megan spent years playing a vintage Rickenbacker lap steel in a custom stand that let her play standing. The Bakelite body plus the stand caused back problems. So she worked with Paul Beard of Beard Guitars to design a lighter instrument that kept the Rickenbacker voice.

• Body shape combines her Dobro outline with the Rickenbacker
• Ash body, roughly half the weight of the original setup
• Lollar horseshoe style pickup for the vintage lap steel voice
• Designed by drawing life size dimensions on her living room floor with cardboard pickguard mockups
• Only one prototype before production

Megan also handles customer support for the line personally, which tells you everything about how this band operates.

Takeaways for Your Own Playing

• Exhaust one master. Megan's Dobro education was Jerry Douglas solos, all of them. Depth beats breadth in the early years.
• Change your writing entry point. If every song sounds the same, stop starting from riffs. Start from a lyric, a conversation, or a groove.
• Arrange covers for fewer players than the original. Constraint reveals what you actually hear and what you actually value.
• Practice for facility, perform for expression. Technique exists so the idea can escape unobstructed.
• Introduce controlled danger on stage. Leave one section open. Let something be genuinely undecided.
• Stop hoarding ideas. Creativity is not a finite reserve. Revise freely.
• Define success at your own scale. Fifty people who genuinely care can sustain a fifteen year career.

Write Your Own Story

Rebecca's closing thought was aimed at every musician watching.

We all have the power to write the stories that we want to write. If you do not like your story, change your story. You are the author. You are the songwriter. Get after it.

Fifteen years of getting it wrong, in public, produced a band that knows exactly who it is. That is not a detour from the work. That is the work.