Music
“I try to look at it like a day job – writing from nine to five, essentially.”
Buck Meek takes his craft seriously. Chatting to CLASH over Zoom from his home studio – he’s just taken delivery of some new mics, which he can’t wait to test out – the American songwriter overflows with enthusiasm, his infatuation with songwriting beaming out of every pore. A core component of Big Thief – inarguably one of the most vital groups of their generation – his solo catalogue often reaches the same storied heights of his collaborative work. Take new album ‘The Mirror’ – Buck’s first solo effort in three years, it’s a rich, fascinating song suite of personal revelation, propelled forward by his entrancing performances, the input of his storied co-conspirators, and the future-facing production work of close friend and Big Thief bandmate James Krivchenia.
“Releasing an album always feels a little abstract until I’m able to sing the songs for people in a room,” he notes. “I mean, they feel real when I write them, when I record them – these moments of conception feel real when I’m fully present with the songs.”
“Once I’m onstage – and of course, doing interviews – that makes it all feel very real. Being able to talk about the album is one way to reconnect with the songs.”
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‘The Mirror’ is rich in points of connection. Recorded in a log cabin outside Los Angeles, Buck Meek leads the way, joined by Adrianne Lenker, Mary Lattimore, and Alex Somers, amongst others. “I’ve spent basically my entire life getting to the point where I have a community of people around me, that I trust, who have a shared value system creatively, and we can go from start to finish in a matter of weeks and put something like this together. That’s been a lifelong process that’s been very challenging.”
“The biggest challenge was just maintaining focus,” he says. “Because of that community, the actual function of everything is pretty damn-well oiled.”
The album opens in a spartan, intimate fashion. ‘Gasoline’ unfolds like a demo, the vocal little more than a guide vocal tacked into place by Buck’s creative intentionality. “Maybe it was a bit voyeuristic,” he murmurs. “I mean, that’s how I start most songs. For this one, I felt like this kind of adrenaline with the idea of letting it lie, and just letting that live in the song itself.”
“Sometimes I overthink things, and realise later that the song is already finished,” he adds.
“I like to come in with songs as finished as possible, because when I record, I put a lot of intention into choosing the players for the session. I choose the players very carefully. I trust their musicality, but then I get – once they’re in the room with me – I don’t give them any direction at all. I just let the songs direct the band, as far as arrangements go. I feel like I’ve learned to yield better results by just giving people the freedom to come up with their own parts.”
Placing full trust in those around him, Buck let the sessions find their own path. ‘God Knows Why’ for example started life as an all-out electric rocker, before diverging from that plan. “I always imagined it to be a really loud electric guitar songs – like Crazy Horse kind of angsty, loud, rock ‘n’ roll or whatever. We tried that, and everybody played their loud part, and for some reason it sounded very small in the microphones.”
“And James suggested, why don’t we try it much quieter with acoustic guitars? And the sound was so much more impactful. It actually ended up rocking a lot harder with acoustic guitars.”
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James Krivchenia’s production inflections pepper the record, his interest in electronics hugely expanding the palette of colours Buck has to draw on. It’s more than this, however – the songwriter was inspired by the way his friend broke free of musical inhibitions, and took this independence into his own work. “Every musician has found ways of breaking their own rules. Every musician – to some degree – feels locked in to a paradigm that they’re pushing out of. But that paradigm is different for every single musician, and so to see each other break the rules in different ways, it gives a sense of permission. It’s really empowering.”
As a result, a song like ‘Demon’ was permitted to be malleable, moving from a “slow, drugged version… all spaced-out reverb” to its high-octane final form. “Jonathan Wilson, my friend, came in and again, his first response to the song was this Keith Moon style heavy drum part, and it worked immediately.”
Lyrically, Buck Meek revels in the powers songwriting afford him, utilising ‘The Mirror’ as a space for processing often deep-rooted emotion. Final song ‘Out Of Body’ for example “is about death,” Buck explains. “My grandmother passed away, and I wrote that song. It’s kind of a way to process that grief, and imagining being able to communicate with her after she passed away… her sending me signals through the threshold – speaking to me in dreams, and things like that.”
“There’s a life cycle to the album,” he notes. “The birth at the start being this formulation of language, and the death at the end – literally – being about communicating beyond death.”
“I wrote the songs pretty intuitively, but once I had them all on the table, I realised there was these different phases of a relationship within the album. “Usually when you’re in the process of writing a song, I kind of blackout, and I’m just focussed on that one song exclusively. Everything else fades away. But then to step back and listen to the album as a whole, I do see all these patterns of confession.”
“I guess one of the things I love the most about songwriting is something that is inherent in the medium itself,” he says. “You’re always recognising the fact that language is limited. When you’re writing a song, you’re able to embrace that because you have the very powerful context of melody, which I think provides a lot of emotional context.”
“And I think that allows you to really play with words, and remain oblique,” he continues. “You oscillate between oblique and very literal lyricism, because you have all this other context to play with. The space in-between all those things is inhabitable by the listener. Each person inhabits it in their own way.”
“Most of the songs are confessional,” Buck insists, “whether they’re literal or abstract, they’re coming from a true place. That’s another thing I love about songwriting – you have the freedom to try to speak truthfully without needing to be literal.”
Right now, he’s completing a global tour with Big Thief. UK dates included four nights at the O2 Academy Brixton in South London, and he’s relishing the ability to fill up his cup once more. The writing is one thing – the living is another.
“The writing is kind of like journaling,” he adds. “It’s at the end of the process, when you try to put it down on paper, or find the melody or whatever. The actual living is the real work”.
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Words: Robin Murray
Photo Credit: Daniel Arnold