Buck Meek (Wimberley, Texas, 36 years old) points to the river with his finger. It is mid-morning and he accompanies the time to sit on the grass on the banks of the Manzanares on the outskirts of the La Riviera concert hall. Tonight he has a concert in Madrid and is at the sound check of his band, Big Thief, when he comes out to greet the journalist. He looks for a place to chat about his new album, Haunted Mountain (4AD / Everlasting), a work in which, with folk-rock with a good emotional depth, he reflects on the plenitude of love. “How nice it is here!” she exclaims as she fiddles with the grass. He seems like a happy guy.
Haunted Mountain It is the confirmation of this happiness and his third album outside of Big Thief, one of the latest sensations in North American indie rock thanks to sweetly luminous songs and a beauty that becomes narcotic. Since he made his solo debut in 2018 with an album named after him, Buck Meek has always tried to find his own path and style. “It’s something that has always worried me and, honestly, I think I’ve achieved it,” he says. In 2021, marked by the break with his previous partner, he published two saviors and everyone began to take him seriously as a musician capable of having his voice.
“I think that two saviors it was a healing process from the loss and, in a way, she was letting in the seeds of a new love. This record is the celebration of that love that arrives”. It is about his current wife, a “constant inspiration” with whom he has once again felt fullness. And he gives an example: the composition Paradise. “There comes a time when you look at the other person and in their eyes you find a kind of paradise. It’s tremendous, but you wonder if love is a form of magic.
Meek grew up in a Texas town surrounded by blues and folk. That also led him to love fiction, both in songs and in literature. “My grandfather was a devotee of Faulkner and my grandmother was a scholar of Shakespearean and classical Greek literature,” he explains. “I added to that that I loved the stories of the songs of the blues and folk outlaws. I would go to rodeos with my family and there I would not stop hearing these stories”.
After studying at Berklee College of Music—the world’s largest private music university—in Boston, he moved to New York to find his own place. For eight years he was a busker, a regular at the Union Square subway station. “I played to pay the rent for the apartment,” he says with a smile. “New York is a city where the energy always gives you something to learn from.” And, between his personal search and New York, Big Thief also arrived, a band made up of former students from his University.
When a couple of ducks pass near the banks of the Manzanares, Meek doesn’t hesitate to point them out and associate them with his new album. “Anything in nature is a great inspiration for me. From the very title of the album, I try to get rid of the idea that the landscape can give us gifts”, he explains. He says that most of the songs were written in the mountains and lists the important places: the Sierra de la Estrella in Portugal, the volcanoes on the island of Milo in the Greek Cyclades, the Swiss Alps — “where the photo of the cover”—or the Santa Monica Mountains, the place in Los Angeles he calls “home” where he lives with his wife. “Because love is the creation of the home,” he says.
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