For his new solo album, Buck Meek, lead guitarist of Big Thief, went back to Texas with his band – Adam Brisbin (guitar), Austin Vaughn (drums), Ken Woodward (bass), Mat Davidson (pedal steel, vocals), and Dylan Meek (keys) – to record the songs that make up Haunted Mountain over two weeks at Sonic Ranch. Produced by Davidson and engineered and mixed by Adrian Olsen, the album follows 2018’s Buck Meek and 2021’s Two Saviors, with Big Thief records inbetween – U.F.O.F. / Two Hands (2019), and Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (2022).
Haunted Mountain is about love and… something other. Something bigger than love, soulfulness, or a soul seeking fullness. In the songs, five co-written alongside longtime friend and musical hero Jolie Holland and one set to Judee Sill’s final journal entry, love often assumes a natural form, sometimes it becomes artificial, sometimes cosmic. It is a consciousness here, interacting with the lovers, watching them sometimes, becoming them sometimes. Yet romance is not the only form of love Haunted Mountain explores.
The songs were written in mountains; cold springs in the Serra da Estrela of Portugal, the submerged volcano of Milos in the Cyclades, Valle Onsernone in the Swiss Alps, the Santa Monica range Buck now calls home – all where his new love was born. “Love inhabits your environment, animates the inanimate, charging everything around you with a sense of meaning,” Meek says. Haunted Mountain asks, “is love a form of magic?”
Catch Buck Meek at YES this August.
