Larkin Poe's Megan and Rebecca Lovell pack their blues repertoire with wide-ranging solos, as Megan and Rebecca trade leads on lap steel and electric guitar – typically a Strat – respectively.
Their approach to soloing, however, is far from minutely orchestrating every note and slide; it's more about applying the core guitar vocabulary and then running away with it.
“For all of us players, that's why you run scales and try to keep your fingers on your instruments, such that when inspiration and instinct kicks in, you're able to keep up with it,” Rebecca Lovell tells Chris Shiflett on his Shred with Shifty podcast.
“That's kind of been my goal in recent years as a guitarist: to just have to have enough chops to hopefully follow my intuition.”
Rebecca points to her sister, Megan, as the epitome of “really intuitive playing.”
“Megan is the kind of player where if we're in the studio or we're on stage, and I'll sing a melody at her, she can play it right back to me. And that's something that I think I want to embody as a player – that ability to just limit the connection time between your brain and your fingers.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Rebecca also touches on whether music theory informs her playing – if at all – and her dilemma when it comes to breathing new life into well-worn scales.
“I don't know if I'm alone or if I'm of the group, [but] when I'm playing, I'm very rarely thinking of the changes, and I'm very rarely thinking of shapes,” she admits. “I'm truly just trying to hunt and peck and fulfill the melodies that I'm hearing, but none of it [is] informed by theory in the slightest.”
“That's something that I kind of go back and forth on with myself – like, well, do I really need to buckle down and learn more or what? What is more important? What's the goal? Do we want to be like unique individuals and just hunt and peck our way into our own unique sound?”
In celebration of their latest album, Bloom, Megan and Rebecca discussed their dynamic as siblings in a creative space – and the importance of established artists pulling their weight in making sure women are equally represented in the guitar scene.
