Friday, September 8, 2023

Larkin Poe - Stripped

September on this blog has been YouTube month. I don't have enough projects to fill the month but I do have this. I discovered Larkin Poe through fellow blogger Paul who runs the Albums That Should Exist blog. At the time of this post he has put up 18 separate albums from this duo. The bulk of those are pandemic era home concerts and collections of covers from the bands Tip o' the Hat series (8 volumes so far) all sourced from their YouTube channel (thus making it appropriate for September). 
 
The band is made up of sisters Rebecca (lead guitar) and Megan Lovell (slide guitar) with a small backup band consisting of a bassist and drummer. But I really fell in love with Paul's collections of performances that feature just Rebecca and Megan. Paul calls these acoustic performances but the pedantic in me has issue with that because Megan's slide is always amplified and Rebecca is sometimes playing electric guitar as well but that's a minor quibble, the important thing is the music and both are A class musicians that help renew my faith in the idea that guitar based music is not dead.

I've had Paul's first comp of this band, which he titled "Acoustic 2014-2017", and have had it on my iPod and other mobile devices pretty much since he first posted it but lately that hasn't been enough. I based this compilation on that first album Paul posted, removed the covers and expanded it with songs from other collections Paul posted. He did such a fine job gathering and editing these albums I decided not to reinvent the wheel and use his work and my source, thanks Paul hope you don't mind. The albums I used are listed below. Enjoy.

Tracklist

01 Holy Ghost Fire
02 Back Down South
03 Don't
04 She's a Self Made Man
05 Bleach Blonde Bottle Blues
06 You Can Close Your Eyes
07 Blue Ridge Mountains
08 Look Away
09 Tears of Blue to Gold
10 Blunt
11 Cast 'Em Out
12 Elephant
13 Trouble in Mind
14 Keep Diggin'
15 Stubborn Love
16 Easy Street
17 Take What You Want
18 Come On in My Kitchen

Reality Notes

These girls love to play covers - and they do a fine job of it - but one of the things that the pandemic era of YouTube home concerts gave us is a glut of cover versions by so many artists that frankly I'm a bit burnt out by them so this comp is focused on the band's original material (as it should be, they're fine songwriters as well as musicians). There are still a couple covers, Come On in My Kitchen seems to be a band favorite and is featured on two of their albums making it one of their own and You Can Close Your Eyes is just too good to pass up. Being kind of an obscure song to me helps it to fit in. I tried to make sure that the rest were all originals or at least made appearances on their official albums.
 
There was some overlap in the source albums that duplicated a few songs so I chose the best sounding ones. The cover is a pic I found on a Google search and added the text and border. 

YouTube channel

Sources

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