The Larkin Poe and Elvis Costello lore runs deep. After Rebecca and Megan Lovell met the famed UK singer-songwriter in 2007 at a festival in North Carolina and serendipitously wound up singing harmonies for him, an immediate friendship was struck, and Costello took the sisters under his wing. Countless tours, shows, and onstage collaborations ensued, as Costello and Larkin Poe traversed the world.
One highlight for Rebecca Lovell was the moment Costello let her use his famed Jazzmaster – the model he’s been heavily associated with throughout his career. Though she prefers Strats these days, playing her icon’s guitar felt nothing short of surreal.
“I haven't played a Jazzmaster on stage for years, but that was actually the first electric guitar that I ever bought, because I'm a huge fan of Elvis Costello, and just the silhouette that he cuts with his Jazzmaster, and like the red [pickguard], the engraving in the fretboard and everything, is just so sick,” she tells Reverb.
“He let me borrow it when we were on tour with him a few years back. He'd be like, ‘Yeah, when you're sitting in, you can just use mine.’ I was like, ‘I can?!’ I got to play his Jazzmaster. And that has always registered as a sacred experience.”
Costello's influence on Larkin Poe has shaped the way the Lovell sisters approach the music industry, inspiring them to not let genre pigeonholing affect them.
“When we were touring with Elvis Costello, we were eating lunch and he was expounding on the importance of not putting yourself in a box. He is the perfect example of an artist who has had an incredibly diverse career,” she recalled in a 2022 Total Guitar interview.
“He does whatever he wants to do and the thread that connects it all is that it’s Elvis Costello. He was telling us, ‘People will try to attach specific genre tags to you. Keep them guessing. Just go where your heart tells you to go. Let your fans trust that you’re going to curate something that they will love regardless of genre.’”
