Larkin Poe and Nu Deco Ensemble

by Corey O'Flanagan

Our chat with Megan and Rebecca Lovell of Larkin Poe, along with Jacomo Bairos of Nu Deco Ensemble.

L-R: Jacomo Bairos, Megan Lovell, Rebecca Lovell

A little over a year ago, I was scrolling Facebook and saw a couple of ladies jamming to Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." Well, it caught my attention (to say the least) and I went into a wormhole of all their amazing videos.

The sisters Megan and Rebecca Lovell make up the core of Larkin Poe. They play bluesy rock and roll with sugar-sweet voices and harmonies. Their covers are amazing, but when you listen further you realize they are tremendous songwriters as well! The full package!

In 2021, they paired up with Nu Deco Ensemble, a flexible and innovative hybrid orchestra, to make a unique new album titled Paint The Roses. In this conversation, we're joined by Megan and Rebecca, along with Jacomo Bairos from Nu Deco Ensemble.



Larkin Poe's Version Of Bessie Jones' "Sometimes"

Megan Lovell: We recorded this song a while back, and it's just a beautiful stomp-and-clap tune. Her version is amazing and so alive, and the energy is palpable. We wanted to take the song and put it on the record, and we had an idea for having a middle section that veered away from just a cappella vocals and claps, which set us up perfectly for going in with Nu Deco because it involved the horn section. Unfortunately, we don't tour with a horn section, so we were never able to do this song live until we worked it out with Nu Deco.

Rebecca Lovell: We started producing our records in 2017 and it served as a great jumping-off point for us to pioneer creatively new directions for us as a group. So on our record Minimum Faith, for instance, which featured our original recording of "Sometimes," being able to stretch out and have fun and ride a horn section and dream big really allowed us to expand our boundaries.

When an opportunity to collaborate with Nu Deco came in the pipeline in 2020, we're so lucky that they pursued us and asked us to be a part of their incredible live performance series. It was a perfect hand-in-glove situation where we had a song that had a brass section and they had a killer brass section and the fireworks just took off.


How The Nu Deco Ensemble Found Larkin Poe

Jacomo Bairos: We are a hybrid chamber orchestra, where our tagline is "We're Miami's 21st Century Genre Mini-Chamber Orchestra." We'd like to believe and try to put forth the vision of what we think the orchestra can be for the future and for now. We want to be as relevant as possible, as compelling as possible. We want to transform and enrich lives through education and also bring audiences and artists from all kinds of backgrounds together to meet in a very communal space. We want to be an access point to people like Larkin Poe's fans who've never been to an orchestra, or people who love the orchestra or the symphonic institution, and then hear Larkin Poe and go, "Oh my gosh, what great artistry that can be combined."

The big overall picture is that we believe the orchestra has no boundaries, walls, or ceilings - there's no real limit to the styles or genres or musical and/or collaborative performances that we can do. That goes beyond just music - multimedia, DJs. There are all kinds of different things that we think are possible with the orchestra. We want to reflect that in our programming and in our performances. That's who we are in a nutshell.

Larkin Poe was something that, to be honest, wasn't a genre of music that I would find on Spotify and just listen to all day long. I mean, I love different artists and different artists to blues rock. I respect the history of Americana and where they came from and the people before them, but it just wasn't a genre that was in my comfort zone. However, our newly minted manager at the time, Andrew Lee, from Red Light Management was like, "Man, you guys gotta check out this duo, check out these girls, they're amazing, they're making noise, they're so good." And lo and behold, I start listening and I'm like, "Wow, man, they're really great!" Great energy, great focus.

One of the perks was they had this incredibly engaged fanbase that you could tell was a very fervent, engaged fanbase. I want to say they were probably the first musical group that we felt had that kind of a fanbase.

They were the first blues-rock duo/group that we had ever collaborated with, so there were some hesitations for me in the beginning, wondering how that kind of sound, that kind of volume, can work with the orchestra because the orchestra is acoustic. We have strings, violins, woodwinds, brass, and we amplify everybody. We have a certain sound before us and we even have a rhythm section. But even so, there's a nuance that goes back and forth between all artists on stage, and I was curious if it was going to work with metallic sounds, rock sounds, lap steels, the whole thing. Well, they got up on stage and about 20 seconds in, I looked around, and it was like, "This is going to be great." They just got it. They got the whole experience. They have a background in classical music in their early education that supports the idea of playing with an orchestra. It was so beautiful and they knew how to nuance what they did with what we did, and we knew how to blend in with them.


Larkin Poe On Metallica And Genre Blending

Rebecca: That incredible album [1999's S&M] by Metallica with the strings shows you what's possible. Sometimes when you're attempting a genre blend, you don't know if it's going to work, if you're going to find common ground. At this point in our career, having a very firm grasp on who we are, musically, we exist within the Roots-American-Blues-Rock and Southern Rock realm of possibility. Hearing how that blends with the orchestra, it was really moving and really exciting. Being able to have a pattern laid out by other rock bands who have collaborated with a string section got our taste buds working and we were super excited to get in the kitchen and cook something up.

There's such a charisma to Nu Deco Ensemble that whips people into a frenzy, so the energy was so beautiful on stage. Sam Hyken wrote the arrangements, and I think that so much credit should be laid at the feet of Sam for having written the arrangements that absolutely created the puzzle piece connection between our songs and Nu Deco.


"Mad As A Hatter"

Megan: "Mad As A Hatter" is one that we wrote probably when Rebecca was 17, so a little over 10 years ago. Our biological paternal grandfather, he dealt with schizophrenia in his life, and mental illness was a conversation that has had a lot of prevalence in our family. As we've toured with this song for the last decade, it's afforded us the opportunity to have a lot of really honest and touching conversations with strangers. We play shows in cities around the world and you get to make new friends, and this song has served as a really important opening line to discuss mental illness and the role that it plays for a lot of people.

From my own journey in writing the song, knowing that mental illness ran in our family and having a bit of an understanding of how challenging it was for our grandfather to live the majority of his life without a diagnosis, there was a lot of mystery and a lot of unanswered questions that the whole family was processing. It created some unrest that I needed to address in writing the song. It served as a great release for me individually and has served as a great connective tissue between us and our fans over the years.

Being able to finally find a way to release this song, this performance with Nu Deco is so magical and it really unlocks this new space for the song, so I hope that people will enjoy this recording because it means a lot to us.


"Every Bird That Flies"

Rebecca: We don't typically do co-writes, but this is a song that we ended up co-writing with a really incredible songwriter outside Nashville called Pat McLaughlin. We were driving out into the country and driving and driving and driving, like, "Where are we going?" Then we got to this incredible songwriter's property - he lives out in the sticks. He takes us out on this little dirt road and we're like, "Dear Lord, please let this not be the end of our story." But we ended up at his writing room.

It was such a cool day, and he's such an insightful writer. Based on who we are as individuals, the conversations got deep and we started talking about my favorite conversation, which is existential crises. He had some really cool things to say, and we started painting some really fun pictures. Those lyrics on the record are actually some of my favorite because I love that it takes you to a sticky, dark venue. It takes me to Alice In Wonderland - that whole exchange with the caterpillar on the mushroom. He's like, "Take a bite of me." It's a song that takes you on a journey to destinations unknown.


Nu Deco's Process Of Choosing Songs And Combining Music Styles

Jacomo: Sam Hyken, my co-founder and artistic partner with Nu Deco, is quite a genius arranger. He likes to listen to a lot of different recordings of the same song. He tries to go for live recordings because those are usually the most authentic versions of an artist, both in their vocals and whatever instrument they play, and you can usually pick up what's really happening. Obviously now with YouTube, you can see what's happening, so that's a great benefit. We both do this together when we are looking at guest artists, and when we listen to their music, we try to find songs that we feel will be elevated and elevate us by combining with an orchestra. Sometimes it can be a really beautiful song, but it doesn't really show the versatility or the dynamic nature of the orchestra so well, or it's not going to be the one that's going to best highlight what this collaboration will be. That's the thought process going into choosing songs.

"Mad As A Hatter" was definitely a song that we wanted to do for sure. Not only because we're obsessed with the song as much as their fans are, but it wasn't something they had recorded before, either. There's always lots of pieces to the puzzle on the why. However, Sam's really good at hearing what the basic outline of a song is, all its different versions, and then coming up with the... I don't wanna say background.

We never like to be a background backup orchestra. A lot of symphony orchestras that do Pops get frustrated because a lot of the arrangements are real potato notes, like sitting on whole notes, and it's a really loud band playing and there's a drum set in your ear and it's a turnoff for them. We like to make it very holistic, so we try to find the most engaging way to flesh out the harmonies that are already there. So, when it comes to guitar, they're playing chords and playing harmonies, we can separate that out with the strings and make it have a whole new, different feel without changing the overall big picture.

Sam is amazing. Not only is he great at helping to elevate guest artists that come and join Nu Deco and taking their music in new directions, but he also is a big fan of contemporary artists in general and reimagines their music in these suites as well.



How A Single Performance Launched Paint The Roses

Rebecca: The fact that Paint The Roses is here is quite a great surprise because when we first began the collaboration between Larkin Poe and Nu Deco, the intention was to have a singular live performance. It was coming out of COVID and we had a COVID-safe performance that was just a live stream, and it was an incredible evening. There were a few people that were there on site down in Miami at the beautiful Bandshell - home turf of Nu Deco - and it went so beautifully. We all had so much fun and it felt somewhat transcendent, and we decided to check the tapes and check the board recordings from the show. We were all bowled over by the energy that was captured and the spontaneity and how good it sounded. Sometimes with live performances you're not super well-rehearsed. We only got to make music as a crew for technically a day and a half, so it went shockingly well.

Megan: It was also a great learning experience for us about how to think about a live recording, because we'd been producing our studio albums for the past few years and this was definitely new for us, coming into a situation where there's these raw files and having to think about putting them together into an album because you received the files. It actually doesn't sound exactly the same as from the board recordings - we shaped them to sound good for the albums. That was an amazing experience to go about mixing it and presenting it for a record. It was a fun process, but definitely very different from our usual process.

Rebecca: And time intensive. Shout-out to Roger Alan Nichols for his diligent work on mixing and sculpting this into something really beautiful.

Jacomo: I don't think we all thought an album would come out of this, but I knew after the performance that this was something special and it was going to be hopefully an album. I was already pushing it that night. I was like, "We gotta release this, we gotta release this..." We want to strike while the iron's hot. That's something we learned: The more you let things linger, the less energy flows toward that thing. Where your focus goes, your energy flows.

That project and that concert went way beyond where we thought it was going to go. It is done. Obviously the fans are reacting to it and really loving it. It's brought a lot of Larkin Poe fans and listeners over to us and what we're doing, which has been really exciting, and we also learned that there is no style out of bounds. Even though we claim there wasn't, we just hadn't tried them all yet, and this was one we got to do that showed us that we could do it.

One of the things we all learned is that Megan and Rebecca's professionalism, their team's professionalism, their overall chutzpah and lace-up-your-boots and get the work done attitude, is something that inspired both Sam and I. We've tried to adopt a little more of that professional attitude across our team and everything we're doing. There were a lot of takeaways that were positive with doing this album that we're all very proud of.

January 11, 2022

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Photos courtesy of Nu Deco Ensemble

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Comments: 1

  • Ruth Hubbard Lovinsohn from Black Mountain, Nclove what Larkin Poe & Nu deco have done together here... blessings...keep up the wonderful music & lyrics...
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