Larkin Poe – Blood Harmony

Several years into this project, I’m embarrassed:

• that it has taken this long
• that it is nowhere near the end
• that it repeatedly portrays me as having challenges with alphabetization.

Case in point: I am currently in a phase I call “catchup” – having gotten through the artists beginning with ‘P’ in my collection (last spring!), I’ve since been trying to cover newer acquisitions with earlier letters. I do this in fits and starts. I also try to do this in alphabetical order, and ultimately my goal is to organize these all alphabetically, although it’s pretty clear that’s never gonna happen.

So I go through my new acquisitions shelf, pull out the next handful to write about, shoot the covers, upload them, go about my 20 other little projects, and eventually get around to writing a tiny bit about these records that have only been with me for a year or two. (There’s not a lot to say.) Then I start drafting the posts, actually get a few published, and realize: ‘R’ comes before ‘U’. As in: Larkin Poe should have come before Laufey.

None of this matters, of course, and I don’t even need to do this project. But to my surprise, there are people who read it, and people who comment on it, and that brings me a little bit of joy – especially when those people were involved with the records I’m writing about, like a comment I got this week from the bass player on a Rory Block record (one that I didn’t care for – but it had nothing to do with the musicianship, just the song/style choices that undercut a powerhouse performer). So, I keep on going, and despite having passed them in the alphabet, I come back to Larkin Poe.

Several years ago (on what was supposed to be a two-year project), I wrote about my discovery of Larkin Poe. Their fiery electric southern blues sound has very much become comfort food, as well as a reliable choice for times when my younger kid is in the car with me – if we take a journey together, I can put Jefferson Airplane or The Faces or Larkin Poe on the playlist and be pretty sure they’ll be happy with that.

After putting out two albums back to back in 2020, they released “Blood Harmony” in 2022, and it’s just as solid as anything they’ve done. And it did win a Grammy for best contemporary blues album in 2024, so I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

It still isn’t the style of blues I’m most likely to go to – so I think of them more as rock than blues in some ways, and don’t slide into Larkin Poe from playing John Lee Hooker, for example. But they get some play.