The latest full-length from Larkin Poe, Blood Harmony is a whole-hearted invitation into a world they know intimately, a Southern landscape so precisely conjured you can feel the sticky humidity of the warm summer air. In bringing their homeland to such rich and dazzling life, Georgia-bred multi-instrumentalist sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell fortify their storytelling with a blues-heavy sound that hits right in the heart, at turns stormy and sorrowful and wildly exhilarating. Rooted in the potent musicality the Nashville-based duo has brought to such widely lauded work as 2018’s Venom & Faith (a GRAMMY® Award nominee for Best Contemporary Blues Album), Blood Harmony affirms Larkin Poe as an essential force in shaping the identity of Southern rock-and-roll, breathing new energy into the genre with both forward-thinking perspective and a decidedly feminine strength.   “We have such fond memories of our upbringing and experiencing the beauty of Southern hospitality in its truest form—it’s a very loving and inclusive energy,” says Rebecca, Larkin Poe’s lead vocalist/lyricist. “There’s an idea that we don’t walk alone, and that there’s safety in keeping your door open to anyone and everyone. What we try to share through our music is the emotional equivalent of opening your door to everyone and inviting them in for sweet tea.”   In a departure from the self-contained approach of past albums like 2020’s Self Made Man—a critically acclaimed LP praised by American Songwriter as “pumped up for arena-sized consumption without compromising any of its stripped-down command and intensity”—Larkin Poe co-produced Blood Harmony alongside Texas-bred musician Tyler Bryant (also Rebecca’s husband). “In the past we’ve taken a very intentional tact of self-reliance, but this time it felt right to open up the process while still keeping it a family affair,” says Rebecca. With Megan handling harmony vocals, lap steel, and resonator guitar and Rebecca on guitar and keys, Larkin Poe also enlisted members of their longtime live band, including drummer Kevin McGowan and bassist Tarka Layman. Mainly recorded at Rebecca and Tyler’s home studio, the result is an electrifying body of work that fully harnesses the fiery vitality they’ve shown in touring across the globe. “We spent a lot of time hashing everything out in pre-production, just the two of us, so that by the time we got to recording we’d already worked out all the details,” Megan recalls. “We didn’t want to end up stitching a bunch of takes together—we just wanted to get in there and make it as live and raw as possible.”   One of the first songs penned for Blood Harmony, “Southern Comfort” instantly set the tone for Larkin Poe’s finespun reflection on their heritage. With its soul-stirring harmonies and sharply detailed lyrics (“Blue jeans, leaning on a hot car/Broke every string on my old guitar”), the fiercely stomping track channels both gutsy determination and a homesick longing for days gone by. “That song partly came from thinking about our little aunts in Chattanooga,” Rebecca says. “It’s about rolling up as rock-and-roll musicians with tattoos on our arms, and they’d just sit us down and get out the pinto beans and collard greens and cornbread.” Another meditation on the preciousness of family, Blood Harmony’s smoldering title track celebrates a certain unbridled spirit passed down through generations. “‘Blood Harmony’ came together after Megan and our mom and I all read Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, which is about the ways we perceive the passage of time,” says Rebecca. “There was just something about the sweetness of all three of us reading the same book, and then being able to talk about how it related to our love for each other and our love for music.” And on “Georgia Off My Mind,” the duo deliver a heavy-hearted yet swinging lament for what we leave behind in chasing our dreams. “Like 99 percent of my songs, that song came into being at my kitchen table late in the evening,” says Rebecca. “My husband and I stumbled into that line at the chorus—‘Tennessee keep Georgia off my mind’—and it turned into a love song for the stretch of I-24 that connects Atlanta and Nashville, which is a drive we’ve made thousands of times now.”   All throughout Blood Harmony, Larkin Poe imbue their songs with equal parts soulful sensitivity and thrilling ferocity—an element on full display in the feverish guitar work of “Bad Spell.” “Ever since I heard ‘I Put a Spell on You’ by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins for the first time I’ve wanted to write a female response to it,” says Rebecca. “I’d had the title ‘Bad Spell’ in my journal for years, and it was so fun to create a song where the riffs and guitar tones have that singular purpose of nastiness and swagger.” From the bare-bones frenzy of the album-opening “Deep Stays Down” to the euphoric bounce of “Kick the Blues” to the moody enchantment of “Lips As Cold As Diamond,” Blood Harmony reveals a band in complete touch with their formidable intuition. “We’ve always been tenacious about following our gut, and that’s really served us well,” says Megan. “With my playing on this record, I trusted my own process and my own voice more than I ever have before, and when I listen back it sounds so much more like me. There’s a lot of power in that.”   A glorious testament to staying true to your instincts, Blood Harmony ultimately embodies a joyful empowerment that Larkin Poe hope to extend to their globe-spanning fanbase, including the close-knit community who call themselves Kinsiders. “They’re people who have maybe never met in the flesh but are still able to connect and commune, and they’re all so accepting of one another,” says Rebecca. “We always feel that very loving aura at our live shows, and we feel incredibly fortunate for that. It’s our highest and best purpose to be that connective tissue for others.”

Conventional wisdom says the two frontmen of a band shouldn’t live on opposite sides of the United States, but that's never seemed to deter Avi Vinocur and Patrick Dyer Wolf.   Goodnight, Texas is a tough-to-define storytelling folk rock band whose strength lies in unexpected sweet spots. Drawing their name from Pat and Avi’s onetime geographic midpoint (the real town of Goodnight in the State of Texas, a tiny hamlet east of Amarillo directly betwixt San Francisco, CA and Chapel Hill, NC), the five-piece band also exists at the center of its songwriters’ contrasting styles — via a 1913 Gibson A mandolin and a 2015 Danelectro Baritone Guitar, at the crossroads of folk and blues and rock ‘n’ roll, in a place where dry wit and dark truths meet hope and utmost sincerity.   The very top of 2022 brings the band’s highly anticipated fourth album ‘How Long Will It Take Them To Die’, a dark yet lighthearted shoebox of knick-knacks and newspaper clippings - perhaps reflecting on either the last two years of isolation, or the whole of American history. In true Goodnight, Texas fashion, complex but relatable characters and locations are still featured alongside stories of self-discovery, rowdy behavior and heartbreaking loss, but with a more honed sound. Thanks in part to the creative and performative talents of the permanent lineup Scott Padden (drums, upright bass), Adam Nash (lead guitar, pedal steel, violin) and Chris Sugiura (bass), we hear Goodnight, Texas in a more detailed and developed way. Where past Goodnight, Texas albums have traveled cross-country and throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, this new offering falls on a z-axis somewhere between the aurora borealis and six feet underground.   Of the album’s first single ‘Hypothermic’, singer and co-songwriter Avi Vinocur says: “Stories from different corners of the American past can often be dark and heavy. Our band's music has always followed along, telling tales of fiction and non-fiction with sonic landscapes to match. Many of our past songs and albums had taken place in the American South, Northeast, Midwest, and Southwest - but I had written a story in my notebook of a character braving the frigid tundra of Canada by car, north toward the distant U.S. state of Alaska - through hallucinations, paranoia, and exhaustion - to escape something unknown. It matched the sinister sound of this strange heel-thumper I had been working with on guitar - and together they were a perfect pair. “Hypothermic” is the result - our attempt to tell stories of America's furthest corner, under a darker headlight, and attempting to sonically capture the heaviness of not only America's past, but its present.”   In March 2020, as the world confronted a new indoor reality, two long minutes of the GN,TX mainstay “The Railroad” found themselves in the intro sequence of the first episode of Netflix’s “Tiger King,” which shattered streaming records with 34 million views in 10 days.   Also in March of 2020, the band released its first live album: “Live in Seattle, Just Before The Global Pandemic.” Jonathan Kirchner recorded, mixed and mastered a weekend of October performances at Tractor Tavern that featured a newly expanded five-man lineup. GN, TX rookie Chris Sugiura brings precision and flair to the bass (and strong hair); grizzled veteran and former GN, TX bassist Adam Nash slides over to lead guitar and pedal steel where he can truly dazzle; extra grizzled veteran and former GN, TX  bassist Scott Griffin Padden holds steady behind the kit, beating the hell out of the available objects with aplomb. In a strange and often dark time, here is a totem of life, and a great example of the raucousness and dynamics of the band’s live performance.   In 2021, Goodnight, Texas were invited by Metallica to contribute to The Metallica Blacklist, a collection of reinterpretations of their legendary 1991 album Metallica (the Black Album). Goodnight, Texas was the only band to cover “Of Wolf and Man'' gaining praise from press and even Metallica themselves - they used the song over the PA following their live performances in late 2021.